Andrew Kopkind
Andrew Kopkind was born in 1935, the only child of a Republican father and a mildly socialist mother. He studied philosophy at Cornell, earned a graduate degree from the London School of Economics and seemed to be on his way as a comfortable fifties' era journalist – for The Washington Post, then Time – when history intervened. As a writer for The New Republic in the mid-sixties, he introduced the SNCC workers of the South and the SDS organizers of the North to a national liberal audience. He became US correspondent to the New Statesman, wrote famously uncompromising essays for The New York Review of Books and was a founder of Mayday (later Hard Times), a newsletter that both shaped and was shaped by the radical politics of the era.