Karl E. Meyer papers

1909-2019

Karl Ernest Meyer was an American journalist and author, born in Madison, Wisconsin to Ernest Louis Meyer and Dorothy (Narefsky) Meyer in 1928. Meyer was a third-generation journalist. His father, Ernest L. Meyer, wrote for The Capital Times and The Progressive in Madison, Wisconsin, as well as the New York Post and the New York Daily News. His grandfather, Georg Meyer, was the editor of Das Germania, a German language newspaper in Milwaukee.

The Meyer family moved from Wisconsin to New York City in 1935 when Ernest Meyer took a columnist position at the New York Post. Karl Meyer completed the remainder of grammar school and high school in New York City, graduating from Elisabeth Irwin High School in 1946. As an undergraduate, Meyer returned to the Midwest to attend the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in history in 1951. From Princeton University, Meyer earned a Master's degree in public affairs in 1953, and a Ph.D. in politics in 1956.

Karl Meyer had a youthful start to a long journalism career, with his first articles appearing in Union Labor News and The Capital Times in 1946, just as he entered college. At the University of Wisconsin, he wrote for and edited the campus newspaper, The Daily Cardinal and its literary magazine, Athenaean. Meyer's first short stint with The New York Times came in the summer of 1952. He also wrote on a freelance basis for The Nation, The Progressive, and The Reporter from 1952 to 1954. From 1956 to 1965, he lived in Washington, D.C. working as an editorial writer for the Washington Post. From 1961 to 1965, Meyer also served as American correspondent to the British magazine, The New Statesman. In 1965 Meyer moved to London to accept the position of Washington Post London bureau chief. He remained there until 1970, when he returned to New York City to serve as the Post's New York bureau chief until 1972. Meyer wrote a regular television criticism column for Saturday Review from 1975 to 1979. In 1979, Meyer joined the editorial board of The New York Times, remaining in that role until 1998. He was a contributing editor to Archeology magazine from 1999 to 2005, and an editor of World Policy Journal from 2000 to 2008.

Notable highlights of Meyer's career as a foreign correspondent and editorial writer include: interviewing Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains during the Cuban Revolution in 1958; being among the first journalists to cover the Bay of Pigs; reporting on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia from inside that country in 1968; and in 1990, holding a previous generation's Pulitzer Prize-winning Times editorial writer, Walter Duranty, accountable for serious reporting lapses regarding Joseph Stalin's human rights abuses.

Meyer is the author of over a dozen extensively researched non-fiction books on topics including history, international affairs, journalism, archeology, and museums. His book, The Plundered Past (1973), which was serialized in The New Yorker magazine, stands as an early critique of cultural imperialism and was an important influence upon the cultural restitution movement. Later in his career, Meyer frequently collaborated with his wife, fellow journalist Shareen Blair Brysac, who co-authored four of his later books.

From 1979 to 2002 Meyer taught journalism at Yale University, Princeton University, and Bard College. Meyer was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations from about 1980 onward. Throughout his professional life, he was a frequent public speaker, lecturing at academic conferences throughout the United States and internationally. Meyer was a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, a literary society devoted to Sherlock Holmes, from 1957 until his death.

Prior to his 1989 marriage to Brysac, Meyer's two earlier marriages, with Iris Hill and Sarah Neilson Peck, ended in divorce. Meyer and Peck had three children. Karl Meyer died of complications from cancer in 2019.