Ronald Steel
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. Early life
Ronald Lewis Sklut was born on March 25, 1931, in Morris, Illinois, outside of Chicago. He was Jewish, and his father immigrated to the United States from Russia. Steel earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and English from Northwestern University (1953) and a Master of Arts degree in political economy from Harvard University (1955). He served in the United States Army, stationed in Paris and was a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service, stationed in Hamburg. Career
Steel was an editor for the Scholastic Corporation from 1959 to 1962. By 1960, he had begun writing under the pen name Ronald Steel. After leaving Scholastic, he lived in Europe, working in Paris and London as a writer and translator. Steel was the author of Walter Lippmann and the American Century, the definitive biography of Lippmann. For this book, he was awarded the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction, a National Book Award,
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. Steel was a professor of International Relations, History, and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he taught from 1986 to 2008. Before teaching at USC, he taught at Yale University, Rutgers University, Wellesley College, Dartmouth College, George Washington University, UCLA, and Princeton University. Steel wrote for The New Republic in the 1980s. He has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. Later life and death
In 2016, Steel moved to a nursing home in Washington, D.C., due to increasing cognitive impairment from dementia. He died there on May 7, 2023, at the age of 92. Works
 U.S. Foreign Trade Policy, 1962 
 Italy, 1963
 The End of Alliance: America and the Future of Europe, 1964
 North Africa, 1967
 Pax Americana, 1967
 Imperialists and other Heroes: A chronicle of the American Empire, 1971
 Walter Lippmann and the American century, 1980
 Temptations of a Superpower, 1995 
 In Love with Night: the American romance with Robert Kennedy, 2000

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1931 births
2023 deaths
20th-century American historians
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American expatriates in England
American expatriates in France
American male non-fiction writers
American foreign policy writers
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Bancroft Prize winners
Deaths from dementia in Washington, D.C.
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Historians from California
Historians from Illinois
Jewish American historians
National Book Award winners
Northwestern University alumni
People from Morris, Illinois
The New Republic people
United States Army soldiers
United States Foreign Service personnel
University of Southern California faculty