astrology, computers, or other such specialized topics. Exceptions are a handful
of advice, society, and Hollywood or Broadway columnists who were pioneers
in their field, or who became so well known and thoroughly identified with
column writing that it would seem unfair to exclude them. Examples are Broad-
way's Earl Wilson and Ed Sullivan, Hollywood's Louella Parsons and Hedda
Hopper, advice mavens Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt, and society chronicler
Maury Biddle Paul.

Included in these pages are local columnists who write exclusively for one
newspaper, self-syndicated columnists who sell their work to a variety of papers,
and columnists whose work is distributed more widely by established syndicates.
Entries are arranged alphabetically by columnists' last names, and the phrase
"American newspaper columnists" is interpreted somewhat loosely to mean
persons whose columns appear or appeared in U.S. papers. A few columnists
who are not U.S. citizens appear here, for example, former Soviet premier Mik-
hail Gorbachev and prominent Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, who are distrib-
uted by the New York Times Syndicate, and former Soviet journalist Vladimir
Voina, handled in America by Creators Syndicate.

In selecting the six hundred columnists to be profiled, the author attempted
to include all the true giants of column writing, living or dead--men and women
such as Franklin Pierce Adams, Raymond Clapper, Irvin S. Cobb, Eugene Field,
Doris Fleeson, Frank Kent, Arthur Krock, Walter Lippmann, Anne O'Hair Mc-
Cormick, Ernie Pyle, Carl Rowan, Mike Royko, Bert Leston Taylor, and Do-
rothy Thompson. This part of the selection process was easy. The most difficult
part was determining what local columnists to include. No one individual is
qualified to make these choices alone. Accordingly, the means of selection used
here was to write to two respected journalism professors in each state, asking
for "nominations" for the best local columnists in their city, state, or region.
From the resulting list, the author wrote to the "nominees," asking them to
complete a biographical information sheet. The same method was used earlier
for the author's 1993 book The Best of the Rest: Non-Syndicated Newspaper
Columnists Select Their Best Work ( Greenwood Press), an anthology of the work
of local columnists. All these columnists were also asked to recommend other
columnists, living or dead, who, in their opinion, warranted inclusion in this
book. These individuals were also contacted by the author. A few other local
columnists were added after having won various writing awards or because the
author especially admired their work.

The remainder of the columnists profiled here are syndicated or self-
syndicated writers whose work, in the author's judgment, appeared of good
quality or, in the case of new columnists, showed considerable promise, and for
whom sufficient information could be found by library research, by direct con-
tact, or by contact with the columnist's syndicate.

Finally, the author has chosen to include individuals who wrote newspaper
columns but are not mainly remembered as columnists. Examples are novelist
John O'Hara, humorists Joel Chandler Harris and James Thurber, writer Chris-

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