| Ronald Steel | |
| Birth Name: | Ronald Lewis Sklut |
| Birth Date: | 25 March 1931 |
| Birth Place: | Morris, Illinois, U.S. |
| Death Place: | Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Education: | Northwestern University (BA) Harvard University (MA) |
| Occupation: | Author, journalist, historian, professor |
| Years Active: | 1959–2008 |
Ronald Lewis Steel (né Sklut; March 25, 1931 – May 7, 2023) was an American writer, historian, and professor. He is the author of the definitive biography of Walter Lippmann.[1]
Ronald Lewis Sklut was born on March 25, 1931, in Morris, Illinois, outside of Chicago.[2] He was Jewish, and his father immigrated to the United States from Russia.[3]
Steel earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and English[1] from Northwestern University (1953) and a Master of Arts degree in political economy from Harvard University (1955).[4] [5] He served in the United States Army, stationed in Paris and was a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service, stationed in Hamburg.[3]
Steel was an editor for the Scholastic Corporation from 1959 to 1962.[3] By 1960, he had begun writing under the pen name Ronald Steel.[3] After leaving Scholastic, he lived in Europe, working in Paris and London as a writer and translator.[3]
Steel was the author of Walter Lippmann and the American Century,[6] [7] the definitive biography of Lippmann.[1] For this book, he was awarded the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction, a National Book Award,[8] [9] the Bancroft Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. The book was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973.[10]
Steel was a professor of International Relations, History, and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he taught from 1986 to 2008.[3] Before teaching at USC, he taught at Yale University, Rutgers University, Wellesley College, Dartmouth College, George Washington University, UCLA, and Princeton University.[6]
Steel wrote for The New Republic in the 1980s.[11] He has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.[4]
In 2016, Steel moved to a nursing home in Washington, D.C., due to increasing cognitive impairment from dementia.[3] He died there on May 7, 2023, at the age of 92.[2]