| Summary: | When I.F. Stone died in June 1989 the Daily Telegraph described him as "the most notable radical publicist of his time" the Guardian called I.F. Stone's Weekly "essential reading for two generations of opinion makers" the Independent eulogized "the most famous crusading journalist in the United States." Stone's death made the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post. It was also on all three U.S. network news broadcasts. Yet today I.F. Stone is practically a forgotten figure, a relic of the 1960s like sit-ins or manual typewriters. Even those who do remember Stone's enormous influence in the Washington Post's words "felt, though not welcomed, at the highest levels of government" know him only through the Weekly, his one-man newspaper whose 70,000 subscribers included Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Marilyn Monroe, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Invention of I.F. Stone is partly, then, a work of historical recovery. But it is also a study in post-Cold War history, and in the historiography of the American Left. By restricting myself to the period before the Weekly my aim is to show the personal, cultural, and historical roots of Stone's achievement. Like Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, or Lincoln Steffens, I.F. Stone was a muckraker who wrote to change the world. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Michael Denning, Maurice Isserman, and Ellen Schrecker as well as my own extensive research on Stone's writings (published and unpublished), and over a hundred interviews with family members, colleagues, friends and opponents, plus the over 6000 pages released to me by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the Freedom of Information Act I will show that just as Walter Lippmann came to personify the American establishment, so I.F. Stone became not just a symbol but an embodiment of dissent.
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