The Creation of Dr. B

Richard Pollak's books, besides The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, include After the Barn: A Brother's Memoir; The Colombo Bay, an account of his five-week voyage on a container ship after the 9/11 terror attacks; Up Against Apartheid: The Role and the Plight of the Press in South Africa, and The Episode, a novel that deals with epilepsy. From 1979 to 2004, he served variously as executive editor, literary editor and contributing editor of The Nation. He has written for that weekly, and for Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review and other major magazines, and he co-founded and edited [More] magazine, the monthly journalism review that published in the 1970s. He was an associate editor at Newsweek, a political reporter at The Evening Sun in Baltimore, and a Poynter Fellow at Yale University, where he created and taught a course in “The Politics of Journalism,” which he also taught for several years at New York University. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife, the pianist Diane Walsh.