Kluger, Richard 1934–

PERSONAL:

Born September 18, 1934, in Paterson, NJ; son of David (a business executive) and Ida Kluger; married Phyllis Schlain, March 23, 1957; children: Matthew Harold, Leonard Theodore. Education: Princeton University, B.A. (cum laude), 1956.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Berkeley, CA. Agent—Georges Borchardt, Inc., 136 E. 57th St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER:

Wall Street Journal, New York, NY, city editor, 1956-57; County Citizen, New York, NY, editor and publisher, 1958-60; New York Post, New York, NY, staff writer, 1960-61; Forbes magazine, New York, NY, associate editor, 1962; New York Herald Tribune, New York, NY, general book editor, 1962-63, book editor, 1963-66; Book Week, New York, NY, editor, 1963-66; Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, managing editor, 1966-68, executive editor, 1968-70; Atheneum, New York, NY, editor in chief, 1970-71; Charterhouse Books, New York, NY, president and publisher, 1972-73.

MEMBER:

Princeton Club of New York.

AWARDS, HONORS:

National Book Award nomination and Sidney Hillman Prize, both 1976, both for Simple Justice: A History of Brown v. Board of Education; American Book Award nomination, 1986, and George Polk Prize, 1987, both for The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune; Pulitzer Prize, nonfiction, 1997, for Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

When the Bough Breaks, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1964.

National Anthem, Harper (New York, NY), 1969.

Members of the Tribe, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1977.

Star Witness, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1979.

Un-American Activities, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1982.

The Sheriff of Nottingham, Viking (New York, NY), 1992.

NONFICTION

Simple Justice: A History of Brown v. Board of Education, Knopf (New York, NY), 1976, revised edition, 2004.

(With wife, Phyllis Kluger) Good Goods, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1982.

The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, Knopf (New York, NY, 1986.

(With Phyllis Kluger) Royal Poinciana, Donald I. Fine (New York, NY), 1987.

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, Knopf (New York, NY), 1996.

Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea, Knopf (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including Harper's, Nation, New Republic, New York Times Book Review, and Partisan Review.

ADAPTATIONS:

Simple Justice: A History of Brown v. Board of Education was adapted by Kluger for the television series American Experience, 1993.

SIDELIGHTS:

In keeping with his claim that the quest for social justice in America is a unifying theme to his writing, Richard Kluger's acclaimed nonfiction work Simple Justice: A History of Brown v. Board of Education relates a crucial event in the black population's struggle for equal rights in America. Simple Justice is Kluger's detailed analysis of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of 1954 that decided against segregation in the public school system. In the New York Times Book Review, Robert Conot found Kluger's account "intriguing, encyclopedic and deeply researched…. Kluger tells the story in terms of the people involved, and so turns what might have been a dry text into an exceedingly human drama." Although Conot felt that the book is too long and too detailed, he wrote: "In the final third of the book, when the focus is on the Supreme Court, the story is gripping." Time reviewer Melvin Maddocks concluded that Kluger's "collage of facts and events, institutions and people eventually documents nothing less than a national change of heart."

Originally published in 1976, Simple Justice was revised, expanded, and reprinted in 2004 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision. Kluger reviews the progress that has been made on issues of race in the nearly three decades since the book was first published.

After directing attention to the struggle of African Americans for equal opportunity education in Simple Justice, "a similar impetus on behalf of American Jews led to [Kluger's] writing Members of the Tribe," noted Lincoln Caplan in the Saturday Review. In this novel, set in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kluger draws on incidents of the Leo M. Frank trial that took place in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1913 to 1915. In Members of the Tribe, Seth Adler, a young Jewish lawyer originally from New York defends a Jewish man accused of killing a fourteen-year-old Christian girl. As Caplan maintained: "Though mainly a work of imagination, the narrative draws on historical events and personalities to describe the growing pains of the postbellum South and its awkwardness in accommodating not just blacks and Northerners but also Jews, who had special anxieties about assimilation."

Kluger worked as a book editor for the New York Herald Tribune during its final four years from 1962 to 1966. His 1986 account, or obituary as it has been called, of the Tribune was said by Chicago Tribune reviewer W.A. Swanberg to be a "Grade-A journalistic cliffhanger." As was the case with Simple Justice, the success of The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune is in part derived from its attention to individuals. David Shaw noted in the New York Times Book Review: "The paper was always far more a collection of individuals—and a reflection of their special sensibilities—than it was an institution, and Mr. Kluger does a remarkable job of bringing these people to life on the printed page." Included among those Kluger brings to life are the original founder and editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett; the original founder and editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley; and James Bellows, the last editor of the merged New York Herald Tribune. New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt believed Kluger's enthusiasm for his subject, "which is apparent everywhere," made The Paper a success.

Kluger was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. This is a large volume in which "Kluger racks up his evidence with what seems to be the meticulousness of a lawyer hired both to defend and to prosecute," commented Brad Tyler in the Houston Chronicle. Kluger presents a history of the tobacco industry and writes that he attempted not to judge an industry that functioned long before the health risks of its product became known, and which big tobacco historically dismissed as being unfounded. He focuses on Philip Morris, which began as a boutique that sold tobacco to the British royals and that, over time, became the largest food corporation in America during the 1990s.

In reviewing the book in the New York Times, Lehmann-Haupt criticized the extent to which Kluger takes objectivity when writing about various high-level individuals, commenting that "they rarely seem better than calculating merchants of death." Lehmann-Haupt, who notes that he smoked for three decades, referenced the level of manipulation used in marketing cigarettes as noted in the book. "Not only is Ashes to Ashes another report of the banality of evil, it is also an exercise in horrifying nostalgia. No cigarette brand is mentioned without its slogan or jingle coming instantly to memory! And then comes the humiliating discovery that you were always smoking exactly the brand that the most successful manufacturer at a given time wanted you to." Lehmann-Haupt concluded be describing Ashes to Ashes as being an "important but profoundly depressing book."

Kluger writes of the development of low-tar and filtered cigarettes, sold by manufacturers who implied that they were safer but that would never admit the risk of using any tobacco product. To increase profits, cigarettes were promoted overseas, and sales soon became double those of American sales by Philip Morris. To appeal to young potential smokers, smoking, as well as smokeless tobacco, was linked to sports, sex, rugged maleness, and manufactured icons, and cigarettes were designed to appeal to young women. The industry spent whatever was necessary in marketing, lobbying, and political donations to secure its profits. Even though the dangers of smoking and of secondhand smoke eventually began to generate laws to protect nonsmokers, smoking remained legal. Kluger concludes by suggesting ways in which the number of smokers could be reduced.

Kluger writes of the inaction of the American Medical Association (AMA), which minimized the dangers of smoking and which agreed to sponsor a long-term program to research a safer cigarette, an ineffective effort that was actually paid for by the tobacco industry. John L. Hess reviewed Ashes to Ashes in the Nation, writing: "Others who come out with less than a tar-free rating include the national heart, lung and cancer associations, jealous of turf and fearful of offending trustees [and] directors of cultural institutions who gladly accept donations from Philip Morris, delivering in return what a witty crusader called ‘innocence by association.’"

Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea is Kluger's history of how the map of the United States was formed, beginning with the original borders set by the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The Louisiana Purchase later doubled its size. Kluger's main focus is on the negotiations of boundaries with Britain, France, Spain, Mexico, and Russia, in the last case with the acquisition of Alaska in 1867. Kluger notes the conditions under which much of America was acquired, including through land theft and force. The most recent additions were Hawaii, which was annexed, and Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, obtained as a result of the Spanish-American War. Kluger truthfully writes of the instances when America exterminated Native Americans who stood in the way of "progress," exploited slaves in building the country, manufactured wars for gain, and broke treaties.

A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote that Kluger "comprehensively documents America's expansion—one audacious land swindle, one gunpoint accession, one bloody conquest after another."

Kluger once told CA that his quest for social justice in his writing is a "preoccupation which affects my fiction at least as much as my books of social history; novels of exquisite sensibility are not my metier. I believe that my country has thrived not because of its brash arrogance alone but because many of its people naively hold to the precepts with which the United States was endowed. The most patriotic of our citizens are not those who say, ‘My country, right or wrong,’ but those who call upon it to meet the high promise of its rhetoric and are willing, indeed compelled, to criticize it for its shortcomings and to act with compassion and strength toward that end. The true subversives, I think, are those who mindlessly cheer our every action and fear those—even hate those—who dissent or demur."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 1, 1996, David Rouse, review of Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, p. 1333; August, 2007, Gilbert Taylor, review of Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea, p. 30.

Chicago Tribune, November 30, 1986, W.A. Swanberg, review of The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, p. 6.

Contemporary Drug Problems, winter, 1996, David T. Courtwright, review of Ashes to Ashes, pp. 749-758.

Houston Chronicle, June 9, 1996, Brad Tyler, review of Ashes to Ashes. p. 27.

Insight on the News, May 20, 1996, Hank Cox, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 32.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2007, review of Seizing Destiny.

Nation, May 13, 1996, John L. Hess, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 28; May 3, 2004, David J. Garrow, review of Simple Justice: A History of Brown v. Board of Education, p. 45.

National Review, July 29, 1996, Digby Anderson, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 48.

New York Times, October 30, 1986, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Paper, p. 25; April 15, 1996, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Ashes to Ashes.

New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1977, Robert Conot, review of Simple Justice, p. 15; October 26, 1986, David Shaw, review of The Paper, p. 13; August 12, 2007, Richard Brookhiser, review of Seizing Destiny, p. 26.

Nieman Reports, fall, 1996, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 88.

Political Science Quarterly, summer, 1997, Wendy J. Schiller, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 318.

Progressive, May, 1996, Steve Weinberg, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 43.

Publishers Weekly, March 11, 1996, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 50; May 28, 2007, review of Seizing Destiny, p. 48.

Reason, December, 1996, Jacob Sullum, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 46.

Saturday Review, October 15, 1977, Lincoln Caplan, review of Members of the Tribe, p. 34.

Science, August 9, 1996, Stephen D. Sugarman, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 744.

Time, February 9, 1976, Melvin Maddocks, review of Simple Justice, p. 82; April 29, 1996, Elizabeth Gleick, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 100.

Trial, May, 1998, Robert S. Peck, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 84.

Washington Monthly, June, 1996, Peter Pringle, review of Ashes to Ashes, p. 56.

ONLINE

In Motion,http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/ (March 1, 2008), Yvette Zmaila, review of Simple Justice.