Ronald Steel

• Birthplace: IL

Ronald Steel wrote the award-winning Walter Lippmann and the American Century. A professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, he writes on international relations and American history. He has had articles in the Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New York Times and the New York Review of Books, among other publications.

Steel graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern University with a BA, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and received his masters degree in political economy from Harvard University. After college, he spent time in the army, in the US Foreign Service and working in Congress before he went to New York to write for a magazine. His book on Walter Lippman, which took him some eight years to write, brought him back to the world of academics. Awards he has won include the National Book Critics' Circle Award, the Bancroft Prize in American History, the American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Washington Monthly Book Award, the American Library Association Book Prize, the Sigma Delta Chi Journalism Society Award and the Sidney Hillman Book Prize. Steel was also a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

Most Famous Works

• Pax American (1967)
• Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1981)
• Temptations of a Superpower (1995)
• In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy (2000)