Don David Guttenplan is an American writer who serves as editor of The Nation. A former London correspondent of the magazine,[1][2] he wrote The Holocaust on Trial,[3] a book about the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt libel case while based in the UK's capital.
During the 1980s, he worked in New York City politics and in publishing, where his proudest achievements were drafting the bill to name a portion of Central Park "Strawberry Fields", commissioning of a biography of the anarchist Emma Goldman, and the reissue of the WPA Guide to New York City. He was also briefly lead singer for a punk band, The Editors, before leaving the group to study in Britain. This experience was background for writing pop music reviews in Vanity Fair.
After working as a senior editor at the Village Voice, editing the paper's political and news coverage and writing a cover story exposing the corrupt politics behind the proposed redevelopment of Times Square, his interests for lost causes led him to New York Newsday, where he wrote a weekly media column and covered the 1988 presidential campaign. His reporting on the 1990 Happy Land Social Club fire in the Bronx won a Page One award from the New York Newspaper Guild and his investigative reporting on New York City's ineffectual fire code was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Guttenplan worked for The Nation's London bureau from around 1996 until the 2016 United States presidential election.[2] In 2001, Guttenplan's interest in the uses of British libel laws to silence criticism led him to write about the suit brought by British author David Irving, who claimed no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz, against American academic Deborah Lipstadt, who had called Irving "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." Guttenplan's account of the case, The Holocaust on Trial, was described by Ian Buruma in The New Yorker as "a mixture of superb reportage and serious reflection—about the role of Jewish identity politics in the United States, antisemitism in Britain, the historiography of the Cold War, and so on."[6]Neal Ascherson wrote: "Guttenplan sat through every day of the trial, and no wiser, more honest, or more melancholy book will ever be written about it." The Holocaust on Trial has been translated into German, Italian and Swedish.
When his friend and former teacher Edward Said became too ill to continue lecturing, Guttenplan arranged to film a series of lengthy conversations which, after Said died in 2003, became Edward Said: The Last Interview.[7][8] The British journal Sight and Sound described the film as "the kind of portrait of an intellectual which is very rare," while The Times of London called it "enthralling, touching, melancholic and fierce." The New York Times pronounced it "riveting", adding "Edward Said: The Last Interview proves that a couch, a camera and a great mind can be all the inspiration a filmmaker needs."[9]
In June 2009, Guttenplan completed a biography of I. F. Stone, the American journalist, titled American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.[10] This book was awarded with the 2010 Sperber Prize for Biography.[11]
In 2018, Guttenplan's profile of nine progressive activists in the United States, The Next Republic, was published by Seven Stories Press.[12]
^ ab"Author Biography: D.D. Guttenplan". The Nation. 2 April 2010. Retrieved 12 April 2021. He previously covered the 2016 election as the magazine's editor at large and, for two decades before that, was part of its London bureau.
^Guttenplan, D.D. (2002). The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case. London: Granta Books. ISBN1-86207-486-0.
