John Rensselaer Chamberlain (October 28, 1903 – April 1995) was an American journalist, historian of business and the economy, and literary critic, dubbed "one of America’s most trusted book reviewers."[1]
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A graduate of Yale University in 1925, John Chamberlain began his career in journalism at the New York Times in 1926, and he later served there as both an editor and book reviewer, writing the daily book review for the New York Times for several years during the 1930s. Later, he worked on the staff at Scribner's and Harper's magazines.[2] Serving on the editorial staffs of Fortune (1936-1941) and Life (1941-1950), for a time he wrote the editorials for Life under the direction of Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Inc. Chamberlain was a member of the Dewey Commission and a contributor to Not Guilty: the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials (1938) by John Dewey. For most of this period, Chamberlain was, in own words, "a New York literary liberal" involved in political causes of the Left.[3]
He also taught journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where his students included the noted journalists Marguerite Higgins, Elie Abel and Edith Efron.[4]
"There is nothing like a fact to kill a theory." -- John Chamberlain
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However, in the early 1940s, he became one the several writers and intellectuals of this period who moved to the intellectual Right, along with friends such as former communists Whittaker Chambers and John Dos Passos, although Chamberlain was never himself a communist.[5] Influenced by Albert J. Nock, he credits the writers Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane with his final "conversion" to what he called "an older American philosophy" of libertarian and conservative ideas.[6] Along with his friends Henry Hazlitt and Max Eastman, he helped to promote the work of Austrian school economist F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, writing the "Foreword" to the first American edition of the book in 1944.
In 1946, Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education established a free market magazine named The Freeman, reviving the name of a publication which had been edited by Albert J. Nock (1920-1924). Its first editors included Chamberlain, Henry Hazlitt and Suzanne La Follette, and its contributors during Chamberlain's tenure there included James Burnham, Max Eastman, Raymond Moley, Morrie Ryskind, and the Austrian School economists Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek.[7] He joined the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society during this period, as well. After stepping down as editor of The Freeman, Chamberlain continued his regular column for the periodical, "A Reviewer’s Notebook." From 1950-1960 he was an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal.[8]
William F. Buckley, Jr., credited Chamberlain with "changing the course of his life" by writing the "Introduction" to Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale.[9] Later, Chamberlain became a life-long contributing editor for Buckley's magazine, National Review, from its founding until his death. He still occasionally differed from Buckley; for example, he praised Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.[10]
For twenty-five years, he wrote a syndicated column for King Features which appeared in newspapers across the country.
After his first wife died in 1954, he married Ernestine Stodelle, who had previously been married to the Russian theatrical director Theodore Komisarjevsky, by whom she was the grandmother of one of the suspects in the 2007 home invasion in Cheshire, Connecticut.[11]