Norman Cousins

Norman Cousins was an American journalist, peace advocate, and editor of the Saturday Review for thirty-five years, transforming a literary weekly into one of the most widely read general-interest magazines of mid-century America. Born in West Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1915, he attended Teachers College at Columbia University and joined the New York Evening Post as an education writer in 1934.

After editing Current History magazine, he became managing editor of Saturday Review of Literature in 1940 and editor in 1942 at age twenty-seven. His editorial Modern Man Is Obsolete, published four days after the Hiroshima bombing, called for world federation to control atomic weapons and was reprinted around the world. He retitled the magazine Saturday Review in 1952 and broadened its coverage to politics, science, and the arts, growing circulation from twenty thousand to more than six hundred thousand.

Cousins led the Hiroshima Maidens project bringing twenty-five disfigured young women to the United States for reconstructive surgery in 1955 and acted as an unofficial messenger between the Vatican, the Kremlin, and the Kennedy White House during the negotiations that produced the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty.

Diagnosed in 1964 with ankylosing spondylitis, he documented his recovery using laughter and high-dose vitamin C in Anatomy of an Illness (1979), spending later years as adjunct professor at the UCLA School of Medicine. He died in Los Angeles in 1990.

The name Norman is a masculine name of Germanic origin meaning "northman," originally describing the Norse settlers who founded Normandy. It became a common given name in late-Victorian English-speaking countries, including the New Jersey of his Russian-Jewish immigrant family, who Anglicised the name from Nochum.