Tom Engelhardt

Thomas M. "Tom" Engelhardt (born 1944) is an American writer and editor. He is the creator of The Nation Institute's tomdispatch.com, an online blog. He is also the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of the 1998 book, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation.^[1]

Career

Engelhardt graduated from Yale University and then took a master's degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University. ^[2] As an undergraduate he was attracted into the study of Chinese history by Mary C. Wright, and was a research assistant for Jonathan Spence. At Harvard he was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and became in involved in a draft resistance movement in opposition to the American war in Vietnam. As part of these activities, he became a printer and moved to Berkeley, California. There he began to write about the resistance to the war, and, as he later put it, "the next thing I knew I was a journalist and an editor."^[3]

Engelhardt has been an editor for more than 30 years, working in book and news publishing. He was a senior editor at Pantheon Books where he edited such books as Maus by Art Spiegelman. Currently he is a consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. He also teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a teaching fellow.^[4] In 1991, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship ^[5]

He once described the editing process as:

...more like a craft, that's right, because there isn't as much of a preset pattern for it. There's a word I often think about because it's such a negative in our society, which is 'used.' You say a 'used' car—something previously owned and not particularly good, or 'I've been used, I've been exploited.' But the most beautiful feeling about editing for an editor is that feeling of being used and subsumed.^[6]

Engelhardt created TomDispatch in November 2001, and in 2002, it received support from The Nation Institute.^[7] He has described the site as the "sideline that ate his life". Contributors have included Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, Jonathan Schell, Fatima Bhutto, Nick Turse, Pepe Escobar and Noam Chomsky.^[7][8] He has written many articles and books including The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's.

Selected bibliography

• The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Basic Books, 1995)
• The World According to Tomdispatch: America In The New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008)
• The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket, 2010)
• The United States of Fear (Haymarket, 2011)

Notes

External links

• Tom Engelhardt on "The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s" - video report by Democracy Now!
• Tom Engelhardt is interviewed by Bill Moyers on the 2012 election
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• The American Empire Project