Herbert Mitgang


Herbert Mitgang was an American author, editor, journalist, playwright, and producer of television news documentaries.

Life

Born in Manhattan, he graduated with a law degree from what is now St. John's University. While a student he wrote sports articles for The Brooklyn Eagle.
During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer and Army journalist.

Work

During World War II Mitgang served as an army correspondent and became the managing editor of the
Oran-Casablanca and Sicily editions of Stars and Stripes, earning six battle stars. After the war he joined The New York Times. During a 47-year career at the newspaper, he served as supervising editor of the drama section of the Sunday edition, was a member of the editorial board for twelve years, was the first deputy editor of the OP Ed page that he helped create, and was the paper’s publishing correspondent and a daily book critic until his retirement in 1995. From 1964 to 1967 Mitgang was assistant to the president and executive editor of CBS News and produced several CBS Reports documentaries. He also instructed evening classes in English at City College of New York in 1948–1949 and was a visiting professor at Yale University in 1975-1976. From 1948 to 1949 he was a member of the executive board of the Newspaper Guild of New York. He was a longtime member of, and served as president, of both the Authors League Fund and the Authors Guild. He was a Fellow of the Society of American Historians and a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. Mitgang contributed freelance articles to magazines, wrote several novels and biographies and edited several books. His papers are in the collection of the New York Public Library.
Mitgang was one of the original named plaintiffs in "Authors Guild vs. Google", the purpose of which was to prevent Google from providing a complete searchable index of extant literature.

Books

Mitgang was married to Shirley, with whom he had a son, Lee, and two daughters: Esther who died in 2007, and, Laura.

Death

Mitgang died from complications of pneumonia.