In 2014, I helped to plan The Nation’s 150th-anniversary issue. In those days, one of the few available sources about the magazine’s history was a long essay published in the 1965 centennial issue, “The Nation and Its Century,” by someone named Richard Clark Sterne. Curious about the author, I looked him up and found my way to his apartment in Boston. Even in his late 80s, Sterne was quick-witted, eminently literary, and instinctively political.
Sterne was born in 1927 to a Jewish family of teachers in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. His parents subscribed to The Nation, and he remembered, as a young boy, reading articles about the Spanish Civil War. Later, at Columbia University, he studied with Mark Van Doren, a poet who’d served as the magazine’s literary editor and film…
