Max Lerner

Max Lerner was a gifted writer and educator whose passion for life made him anything but an ivory tower recluse. In public a prominent commentator and college professor, in his private life he was a romantic adventurer, pursuing erotic relationships with unflagging zeal.

Politically, Lerner went through a series of metamorphoses. During the 1930s, he was an anti-fascist "Popular Front progressive" writing for the Nation and the New Republic. From the 1940s through the 1970s, he became the country's leading liberal columnist - first with the lively but short-lived PM, then for the New York Post.

In the 1980s, however, he was repelled by the New Left and the counterculture and joined the ranks of the neoconservatives, scandalizing some readers but insisting he owed it to them to tell the truth as he saw it.