TomDispatch.com

Thomas M. "Tom" Engelhardt (born 1944) is an American writer and editor. He is the creator of The Nation Institute's tomdispatch.com, an online blog. He is also the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of the 1998 book, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation.

Engelhardt graduated from Yale University and then took a master's degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University. As an undergraduate he was attracted into the study of Chinese history by Mary C. Wright, and was a research assistant for Jonathan Spence. At Harvard he was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and became in involved in a draft resistance movement in opposition to the American war in Vietnam. As part of these activities, he became a printer and moved to Berkeley, California. There he began to write about the resistance to the war, and, as he later put it, "the next thing I knew I was a journalist and an editor."

Engelhardt has been an editor for more than 30 years, working in book and news publishing. He was a senior editor at Pantheon Books where he edited such books as Maus by Art Spiegelman. Currently he is a consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. He also teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a teaching fellow. In 1991, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship

He once described the editing process as:

...more like a craft, that's right, because there isn't as much of a preset pattern for it. There's a word I often think about because it's such a negative in our society, which is 'used.' You say a 'used' car—something previously owned and not particularly good, or 'I've been used, I've been exploited.' But the most beautiful feeling about editing for an editor is that feeling of being used and subsumed.

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