Ronald Steel (1931-2023) was an historian who remained steadfastly critical of U.S. postwar and Cold War policy, and wrote prolifically in essays and books. In its obituary, Steel was described by The New York Times as “a bookish, small-town boy from Illinois who became a soldier, wanderer, translator, diplomat, journalist, author and professor.” He graduated from Northwestern University in 1953 with a B.A. in political science and English and earned a master’s degree in political economy from Harvard in 1955. He was drafted by the Army and when it became apparent that he was fluent in French, he was posted to a general’s staff in Paris. After his discharge, he joined the Foreign Service and was a vice consul in Hamburg in 1957-58. Upon his return to the U.S., he settled in New York and became the editor of Scholastic Magazines from 1959 to 1962.
Steel started work on his best-known book, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, in the early 1970s. He worked on the biography while at MacDowell as well as made final edits for Imperialists and Other Heroes: A Chronicle of the American Empire. His biography of journalist Lippmann took nearly a decade, a task complicated, he said, by the subject’s reluctance to reveal “personal” aspects of his life.
One of the most discussed political biographies of its time and a best seller, the Lippmann biography won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the 1981.
Steel was a professor emeritus of international relations, history, and journalism at the University of Southern California. Before teaching at USC, he taught at Yale University, Rutgers University, Wellesley College, Dartmouth College, George Washington University, UCLA, and Princeton University. Later, Steel wrote for The New Republic in the 1980s. He has also written for the Atlantic, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books.
