Early life and family

Kluger grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He attended the Horace Mann School and Princeton University, where he was the 1955-56 chair of the Daily Princetonian. He enrolled in the Columbia School of Journalism but did not graduate.

Writing career

Kluger began his career as a journalist, writing for various small newspapers. He later wrote for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the New York Herald Tribune (he was its last literary editor), and magazines, including Forbes. Kluger left journalism to serve as executive editor at Simon & Schuster and editor-in-chief at Atheneum.

Kluger has written books of fiction and social history. He is the author of six novels (and two others with his wife, Phyllis). Two of his books were National Book Award finalists, Simple Justice and The Paper (a history of the Herald Tribune). His historical study of the American cigarette business, Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.

In 2011, Kluger published The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America.

In 2006, Kluger published Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea, an extended investigation of how the current territory of the United States was amassed. The book received mixed reviews, alternately complimenting its detailed insights into the under-reported history of this issue, and criticizing the author's alleged biases, errors, inferences and presumptions, and allegedly verbose writing style.

Politics

Kluger's writing has been described as liberal, and/or emphasizing racial-injustice perspectives.,

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]