Early Years
Stone was born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who owned a store in Haddonfield, New Jersey. His sister is journalist and film critic Judy Stone. He studied philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer as a student.
Stone attended Haddonfield Memorial High School, where he ultimately graduated ranked 49th in his class of 52. He started his own newspaper, the Progress, as a high school sophomore. He later worked for the Haddonfield Press and the Camden Courier-Post. After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the Philadelphia Inquirer, then known as the "Republican Bible of Pennsylvania". Influenced by the work of Jack London, he became a radical journalist. He joined the Inquirer’s morning rival, the Philadelphia Record, owned by liberal Democrat J. David Stern, and he moved to the New York Post after Stern bought that paper during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, he played an active role in the Communist-dominated Popular Front opposition to Adolf Hitler. But in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939 Stone wrote to a friend saying “no more fellow traveling” and used his column in The Nation to denounce Stalin as “the Moscow Machiavelli who suddenly found peace as divisible as the Polish plains and marshes”.
Read more about this topic: I. F. Stone
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“The years do not wait for us.”
—Chinese proverb.
Confucian Analects.