Underground to Palestine [First Edition]

I. F. Stone (1907-1989) was a politically radical American investigative journalist and writer. He is best remembered for the newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly (1953-1971), which was ranked in 16th place among "The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century" by New York University's journalism department in 1999, and in second place among print journalism publications. He was born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 24, 1907, adopting the initials and adding the surname Stone at age 30. As a child, his family moved to nearby Haddonfield, New Jersey, where his parents, Bernard Feinstein and Katherine Novack, Jewish immigrants from Russia, owned a dry goods store. Stone read widely and favored works by Walt Whitman and Jack London. He made his journalistic debut at age 14 with a neighborhood monthly called The Progress, which featured liberal editorials. He then worked as a reporter on The Haddonfield Press and The Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post. Stone studied philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania while editing and rewriting articles full time at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Although he dropped out of college in his junior year, the university awarded him a B.A. degree in 1975, making him an official member of the class of 1928. Through the years, he also received many honorary doctorates. He was briefly a member of the Socialist Party, wrote editorials for The New York Post, was an associate editor and then Washington editor of The Nation, and then wrote for PM, The New York Star and the New York Daily Compass. Following the demise of these three left-of-center New York dailies, he began publishing his newsletter I. F. Stone's Weekly, which had reached 70,000 subscribers when it halted publication in December 1971. In later years, Mr. Stone wrote for The New York Review of Books and occasionally for The Nation. He died in Boston, Massachusetts on June 18, 1989, aged 81.