Victor S. Navasky served as editor, publisher, and publisher emeritus of The Nation. In the 1970s, he served as an editor of The New York Times Magazine. In the 1960s, he was founding editor and publisher of Monocle, a “leisurely quarterly of political satire” (that meant it came out twice a year). His books include Kennedy Justice; Naming Names, which won a National Book Award; in collaboration with Christopher Cerf, The Experts Speak: The Definitive Guide to Authoritative Misinformation and also Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War In Iraq; A Matter of Opinion, which won the 2005 George Polk Book Award and the 2006 Ann M. Sperber Prize; The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views for the Industry, edited with Evan Cornog; The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power; and The O’Dell File.
Navasky was the founder of The Nation’s prestigious internship program, widely regarded as one of the finest and most rigorous programs for early-career journalists in the country, which was renamed in his honor in 2013. Alumni of the internship program—which has graduated over 1,000 writers—have gone on to produce award-winning, breakthrough journalism, with bylines appearing at leading media institutions around the world.
He was a passionate purist in his prose, his populist politics and his expectations of others and himself.
An excerpt from Victor Navasky's The O'Dell File reveals the story of the civil rights movement's 'unsung hero' who has been wrongly written out of the pages of history.
For decades, first at Pantheon and then at the New Press, he was a lion of progressive publishing.
How did Lillian Hellman become the archetype of hypocrisy?
The Nation’s longest-running columnist was a witty, brilliant, coruscating presence in our pages for almost thirty years.
A real ‘Mad Man’ who dreamed up and helped found the Leadership Network, a mini-advertising consortium that enabled mega-corporations to advertise in small-circulation journals of opinion.
“Christopher had a twenty-five-year adventure with The Nation that I hope was as rewarding for him as it was for us, despite the political collisions.”