Robert K. Landers

Robert K. Landers is a journalist and author, now living in Baltimore. Born in Washington, D.C., he grew up in New York City. After graduation from Brown University, he broke into journalism as a suburban reporter-trainee at the Providence Journal, but his stint there was cut short when he was drafted into the Army. After service in Vietnam as an Army "information specialist," he resumed his journalistic career.

Working as a reporter for the New Haven Journal-Courier, he not only learned about "Model City" politics, but also had a ringside seat at the circus of "the 1960s," complete with antiwar demonstrations, radical student uprisings at Yale, and Black Panther murder trials. He subsequently worked as the city editor at the Torrington Register, a Northwest Connecticut sister paper to the better-known Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass., and later as a copy editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

As a staff writer at Congressional Quarterly's Editorial Research Reports from 1986 to 1991, Landers wrote close to 50 lengthy background reports, based on research and original reporting, and aimed at editorial page editors and libraries. The subjects included the homeless, welfare reform, presidential transitions, the census undercount, opinion polls, think tanks, women and combat, multicultural education, affirmative action, the nurse shortage, independent adoption, DNA "fingerprinting," and the common cold. Some reports challenged the conventional wisdom. Some reports won high praise from noted authorities.

As an editor at The Wilson Quarterly from 1991 to 2006, Landers wrote the magazine's distinctive "Periodicals" section, which consisted of "reviews" and surveys of articles from journals and magazines, far and wide. He also edited essays on such subjects as Vietnam since the war, the prospects of an Islamic "reformation," and the history of money and politics.

During his years at The Wilson Quarterly, Landers researched and wrote a biography--"An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell" (Encounter, 2004). Novelist Farrell (1904-79) is best known for "Studs Lonigan," a trilogy about a swaggering young "tough guy" from a lower-middle-class Irish family on Chicago's South Side. Farrell was once a literary titan, mentioned in the same breath with Hemingway, Faulkner and Dos Passos, and "Studs Lonigan" was considered a modern classic. But this powerful work has fallen into neglect, and Farrell remains a largely forgotten figure. He and his finest achievements--not only the Lonigan trilogy, but also his series of five novels about the O'Neills and the O'Flahertys, which began with "A World I Never Made" (1936) and concluded with "The Face of Time" (1953)--deserve better.

The Farrell biography was warmly received. "This fine biography gives us back an American writer who has been too long neglected," said veteran New York newspaperman Pete Hamill. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, the late Hilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion and former chief art critic of The New York Times, called "An Honest Writer" "a first-rate biography," whose "many virtues" include "the clarity of its prose and the fairness of its judgments." Other published encomiums included: "seminal and clarifying" (ALA's Booklist), "brilliant" (Commonweal), "superb" (The New Criterion), "splendid" (Quadrant) and "definitive" (historian Douglas Brinkley).

For more on Robert K. Landers and his work, go to robertklanders.com.