Carey McWilliams was editor of Nation, the oldest continuously published weekly in the United States, from 1955 to 1975. During that tumultuous two-decade period spanned by the cold war and the Vietnam War, McWilliams refashioned Nation as the leading journal of opinion of indigenous American radicalism. As editor of Nation he drew upon his earlier involvement in California in the literary ferment of the 1920s, the struggles of migrant workers in the 1930s, and the racial conflicts of the 1940s. Fred J. Cook, a longtime associate, stressed how throughout his career McWilliams "seemed to inhale with every breath a sense of developing national issues that others hadn't yet discovered." Studs Terkel called him "a contumacious American radical, who was merely the best muckraking editor of his time."

McWilliams was born on 13 December 1905 in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, to Jerry and Harriet McWilliams. His father owned a large cattle ranch, but lost...