thumb|Schell giving a reading at the [[Occupy Wall Street event Occupy Town Square, in Tompkins Square Park in New York, February 2012]]
Jonathan Edward Schell (August 21, 1943 – March 25, 2014) was an American reporter and writer whose work primarily dealt with American foreign policy from the Vietnam War to the war on terror, as well as the threat posed by nuclear weapons and support for nuclear disarmament.
Life and career
Early life and education
Schell was born in New York City on August 21, 1943, to Orville Hickock Schell Jr., a lawyer who chaired Americas Watch, and Marjorie Bertha. His siblings included a sister, Suzanne, and a brother, Orville Schell, a former Dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.–China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He studied at Dalton School in New York and graduated from The Putney School in Vermont. He managed to acquire a press pass by claiming to be a correspondent for The Harvard Crimson, and would later recount how the correspondents reporting on the war "took [him] under their wing". He was a witness to Operation Cedar Falls, writing particularly on the destruction of Bến Súc. His reportage was published first in The New Yorker and then as a book, The Village of Ben Suc, with Alfred A. Knopf.
From 1967 until 1987, Schell was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as the principal writer of the magazine's Notes and Comment section. He wrote essays for the magazine on the presidency of Richard Nixon, including the Watergate scandal that led to the president's resignation in 1974, that formed the basis to his book, The Time of Illusion. The Notes and Comments section was awarded the George Polk Award for Commentary in 1979.
In 1977, William Shawn, the longtime editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, designated Schell as his chosen successor to replace him but he was forced to rescind that plan as it proved immediately unpopular with the magazine's staff. Shawn revisited the same plan in 1982 but again withdrew Schell's name from consideration in the face of a staff revolt. Ultimately, upon a change of ownership of the magazine in 1987, Shawn was removed and replaced as editor-in-chief with Robert Gottlieb. The book received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He became an advocate for disarmament and a world free of nuclear weapons. He was a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School in 2003, and a fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization in 2005. He taught at several other universities, including Princeton, Emory, New York University, The New School, and Wesleyan University. At the time of his death he was a visiting lecturer at Yale College.
In 2002 and 2003, Schell was a persistent critic of the invasion of Iraq. He later commented, "There doesn't seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media."
Jonathan Schell died at age 70, on March 25, 2014, at his home in Brooklyn, with a cancer caused by an underlying blood condition that may have been caused by Agent Orange. His last years were spent in research on climate change for an unwritten book he titled The Human Shadow.
Reception and legacy
In 1967, John Mecklin wrote in The New York Times Book Review that The Village of Ben Suc, Jonathan Schell's first book, was "written with a skill that many a veteran war reporter will envy, eloquently sensitive, subtly clothed in an aura of detachment, understated, extraordinarily persuasive."
Reviewing The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin, journalist and historian Jonathan Mirsky wrote in The Nation: "I know no book which has made me angrier and more ashamed." The book also reflected on the end of love, politics and art, and the annihilation of humans as a species. CBS News journalist Walter Cronkite called the book "one of the most important works of recent years", praise that helped to solidify the book's commercial success.
Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, however, David Greenberg called The Fate of the Earth an "overwrought doomsday polemic." Two decades later, in Slate, Michael Kinsley characterized it as "an overheated stew of the obvious and the idiotic" and suggested it was "the silliest book ever taken seriously by serious people." The Los Angeles Times noted that "some reviewers found Schell's book shrill and overstated."
In 2019, philosopher Akeel Bilgrami described Schell as "one of the great public intellectuals of our time," and described The Fate of the Earth as a "rightly celebrated classic".