KLAW, Spencer 1920-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born January 13, 1920, in New York, NY; died June 3, 2004, in West Cornwall, CT. Journalist, educator, and author. Klaw was a journalism professor and former editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Earning his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1941, he was a reporter in San Francisco and Raleigh, North Carolina, before serving in the U.S. Army duringWorld War II. After the war, he worked as a reporter for the New Yorker until 1952. His editing career started at the New York Herald Tribune, where he was an assistant to the editor of the Sunday paper; during the late 1950s, Klaw was an associate editor for Fortune magazine. He switched to freelance writing in 1960, and then took up teaching as a journalism lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968 and 1969. In 1970, Klaw joined the Columbia University faculty as a lecturer in magazine writing at the Graduate School of Journalism, where he remained for the next seventeen years. Becoming editor of the Columbia Journalism Review in 1980, Klaw expanded the prominent journal's news coverage and firmly established editorial decisions of the magazine as independent from control by Columbia University. He retired in 1989. Klaw was also the author of three books: The New Brahmins: Scientific Life in America (1968), The Great American Medicine Show (1975), and Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (1993).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, June 21, 2004, section 2, p. 11.

Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2004, p. B7.

New York Times, June 20, 2004, p. A29.

Washington Post, June 21, 2004, p. B6.