Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Political columnist, provocateur and biographer David Horowitz will speak in Johnson Chapel at Amherst College on Tuesday, March 12, at 7:30 p.m. Horowitz was in the news last year for placing provocative advertisements in college newspapers that denounced reparations for slavery and suggested antiwar demonstrations after September 11 were attacks on America akin to treason. His talk, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Amherst College Republicans and the Young America’s Foundation.
Horowitz is the president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles. A best-selling author and editor, Horowitz may be best known for his intellectual and political journey from left-wing radicalism to conservatism. After earning a B.A. in English from Columbia University in 1959 and an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1961, Horowitz emerged as a leader of the New Left as editor of Ramparts magazine, an influential left-wing journal.
Dissatisfied with the results of radicalism in practice, Horowitz withdrew from politics in the ‘70s to write. He and Peter Collier co-authored a series of best-selling biographies of prominent American families: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976), The Kennedys: An American Drama (1985), The Fords: An American Epic (1987) and The Roosevelts: An American Saga (1994). For these works, the Los Angeles Times called Collier and Horowitz “the premier chroniclers of American dynastic tragedy.” In 1978 Horowitz was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1990 he received the Teach Freedom Award from former president Ronald Reagan.
In Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties (1989), Collier and Horowitz chronicled the legacy of the New Left and its effects on American politics and culture. Horowitz’s political journey is recounted in his autobiography Radical Son, (1997). Author George Gilder called Radical Son “the first great American autobiography of his generation.”
Horowitz is the editor of Frontpage, a conservative online publication of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, in which he has outlined his recent ad campaigns. He also appears often in the online magazine Salon, where he has written about Noam Chomsky, Bin Laden’s American supporters, Social Security, police brutality in Cincinnati and gays in the military. His latest article, “Axis of Snobbery,” condemned “liberal intellectuals who praise Bush for prosecuting the war but still insist he’s stupid” as “the real dummies.”
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