Richard Pollak's books include After the Barn: A Brother's Memoir; The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim; The Colombo Bay, an account of his five-week voyage on that 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. Over more than two decades, he served as literary editor, executive editor or 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], the monthly journalism review that published in the 1970s. The magazine is the subject of Provoking the Press (2019), a book by Kevin Lerner saluting the publication and charting its impact. Pollak 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. Since moving to Maine in 2014, he has taught a course on the life and work of Stephen Sondheim, at the University of Maine, Portland. He lives in Scarborough, Maine, with his wife, the pianist Diane Walsh. Pollak is completing a novel, set in 1942 Chicago, about the breakthrough that led to the atomic bomb.