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Norman Cousins

The lifelong concerns of Norman Cousins—writer, editor, citizen diplomat, promoter of holistic healing, and unflagging optimist—were large indeed: world peace, world governance, justice, human freedom, the human impact on the environment, and health and wholeness. His primary platform for promoting his views was as editor of the Saturday Review for the better part of forty years. He was also the author of a dozen books and hundreds of essays and editorials. Besides having been notably active in a variety of peace organizations, he was, in his later years, on the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine.

At Saturday Review, Cousins not only spoke his own mind as editor, he also encouraged other writers and critics in a collective effort "not just to appraise literature, but to try to serve it, nurture it, safeguard it." Cousins believed, "There is a need for writers who can restore to writing its powerful tradition of leadership in crisis."

During his almost four decades with the magazine he came to feel that his readers were a second family: "Nothing in my life, next to my family, has meant more to me than the Saturday Review, he once said. "To work with books and ideas, to see the interplay between a nation's culture and its needs, to have unfettered access to an editorial page which offered, quite literally, as much freedom as I was capable of absorbing—this is a generous portion for anyone."

Cousins used that editorial freedom to speak his mind on a wide variety of the issues of the day, none more important to him than issues of war and peace.

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Norman Cousins

—By Ken Read-Brown, Minister of Old Ship Church, Hingham, Massachusetts

Recommended Reading

Healing Heart by Norman Cousins (1986).