A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York

"A beautifully written and melancholy update, if you will, of Democracy in America by the Frenchman de Tocqueville, this book also written by a man born in France, but one who has spent most of his life in America, most famously as a publisher of books in support of peace and we the people."
—Kurt Vonnegut

"This remarkable work is more than a flesh-and-blood tale of growing up. It is the stunning and revelatory road map of a seeker. It is an autobiography of ideas."
—Studs Terkel

"André Schiffrin’s life story is a riveting journey, from the ‘commanding heights’ of American culture in the 1940s through the culture crash of the Reagan-Bush era. Along the way we meet the ‘great and the good’—heroes like André Gide, who really cared about freedom—as well as villains who just didn’t give a damn. This is the best literary and political memoir I’ve read in years—an indispensable text for understanding what we’ve lost."
—John R. Macarthur

"Life for André Schiffrin has been a continuing course in adult education. His memoir is a master class in living, learning and writing. Sign up now for a fabulous experience."
—Bill Moyers

André Schiffrin was born the son of one of France’s most esteemed publishers, into a world that included some of the day’s leading writers and intellectuals, such as André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

But this world was torn apart when the Nazis marched into Paris on young André’s fifth birthday.

Beginning with the family’s dramatic escape to Casablanca—thanks to the help of the legendary Varian Fry—and eventually to New York, A Political Education recounts the surprising twists and turns of a life that saw Schiffrin, despite his radically altered circumstances, become, himself, one of the world’s most respected publishers.

Emerging from the émigré community of wartime New York (a community that included his father’s friends Hannah Arendt and Kurt Wolff), he would go on to develop an insatiable appetite for literature and politics: heading a national student group he renamed the Students for a Democratic Society—the SDS...running a magazine called Granta at Cambridge University...leading student groups at European conferences—once, as an unwitting front man for the CIA—and participating in public debate with William F. Buckley....

Eventually, Random House chief Bennett Cerf would appoint Schiffrin to head the very imprint founded by his father and Kurt Wolff—Pantheon. There, Schiffrin would publish some of the world’s leading writers, from Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, and Eric Hobsbawm, to Simone De Beauvoir, Studs Terkel, Art Spiegelman, and Marguerite Duras.

But, in a move that made headlines, Schiffrin would ultimately rebel at corporate ownership and form his own publishing house—The New Press—where he would go on to set a new standard for publishing independence.

A Political Education is a fascinating intellectual memoir that tells not only the story of a unique and important literary figure, but provides an absorbing account of the tumultuous political times that shaped him.