Henwood was born to Harold and Victorine Henwood in Teaneck, New Jersey and grew up in Westwood, NJ. As a youth Henwood was acquainted with Marxism, but he briefly self-identified with conservatism towards the end of high school. According to Henwood: "Sometime late in high school, I fell under the spell of Milton Friedman and Bill Buckley, and about the first thing I did when I got to college was join the Party of the Right. I got tired of all the pompous rituals, and political sanity returned, bringing me back to the left from which I’d started". Henwood received a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1975. After college, Henwood worked as secretary to the chair of a small Wall Streetbrokerage firm headed by a former Bell Labs physicist who used quantitative analysis techniques in the mid-1970s, predating the later widespread adoption of similar methods on Wall Street. From 1976 to 1979, Henwood pursued a doctorate in English with a focus on British and American poetry and critical theory at the University of Virginia, but left before completing his dissertation. He then worked for two years as a copywriter and assistant to a medical publisher in New York.
Career
Writing
In September 1986, Henwood launched Left Business Observer . Topics to which he has devoted coverage include:
the influence of foundations on politics and culture
"what it means to be a leftist in a world that seems to have forgotten what that means"
In 1992, Henwood worked with John Liscio on The Liscio Report on the Economy, a financial advisory agency that publishes proprietary research. The newsletter is widely followed in the investment community. In 2000, after Liscio's death, Henwood and Phillipa Dunne, a business partner, inherited The Liscio Report and continue to publish the newsletter using the research techniques pioneered by their mentor. Henwood has written four books. His first, The State of the USA Atlas, is a social atlas of the U.S. in the Pluto Press atlas series. This was followed in 1997 by Wall Street, in which Henwood described the workings of high finance, and then by After the New Economy, an analysis of the 1990sboom and bust. Henwood's most recent book is My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency. His articles have appeared in The Nation, Harper's Magazine, Grand Street, The Village Voice, Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and Extra!. He is a contributing editor at The Nation.
Radio and other media
Henwood began hosting Behind the News in 1996. It is a weekly radio show and podcast produced at KPFA and, formerly, WBAI. Henwood had been a regular contributor to Samori Marksman's show, starting in 1989. Behind the News features interviews with activists, intellectuals, and academics, preceded by a summary of recent economic headlines. Notable guests include Noam Chomsky, James K. Galbraith, Christopher Hitchens, Lewis H. Lapham, George McGovern, Joseph Stiglitz, Gore Vidal, Yanis Varoufakis, and Slavoj Žižek. On November 11, 2010 Henwood announced that he would be retiring Behind the News in its current form, instead broadcasting from another venue and on his website. This change arose from an interim producer's decision to reschedule Henwood's show to Saturdays and reduce its airtime to twice a month despite Henwood's having raised substantial funds during the network's previous fund drive, conditions that the host found unacceptable. Henwood occasionally interviews on other radio and television programs. He appeared in Lewis H. Lapham's dramatic documentary film, The AmericanRuling Class.
