Stanley Karnow

Stanley Abram Karnow (February 4, 1925 – January 27, 2013) was an American journalist and historian. He is best known for his writings on East Asia and the Vietnam War. Karnow was born in Brooklyn in 1925, and had a middle-class, secular Jewish upbringing. His father was a machinery salesman; his mother, an immigrant from Hungary, a homemaker. Interested in writing from a young age, at James Madison High School in Brooklyn he wrote radio plays and was a sports writer and an editor of the school paper. Karnow enrolled at the University of Iowa, but left in 1943 to serve in the Army Air Force, in which he was a weather observer, cryptographer and unit historian along the China-India border. After the war, he attended Harvard University, where he was an editorial and feature writer for the Harvard Crimson and majored in modern European history and literature. Upon graduating in 1947, Karnow went to Paris intending to stay the summer, but wound up staying ten years. Karnow attended the Sorbonne and the Institut d'Études Politiques on the G.I. Bill, and did freelance journalism for the National Guardian, L’Observateur, and New Statesman. In 1950, he was taken on as a local "interpreter, researcher, and legman" by the Paris bureau of Time magazine, but was soon promoted to correspondent, covering France, Western Europe, and francophone North Africa.