Peter Collier –
publisher, editor, bestselling author, and co-founder of the David Horowitz
Freedom Center – passed away on November 1, 2019 – All Soul's Day – at the age of 80.
Peter Anthony Dale Collier was born June 2, 1939 in Los Angeles,
California. Like his close friend and longtime writing partner David Horowitz,
whom he met while both attended UC Berkeley, Collier began his intellectual
life as a New Left radical. In 1966 he became an editor at Ramparts
magazine, the Left’s most influential publication at the time, as did Horowitz
two years later. Collier and Horowitz took over the magazine in 1969 and edited
it until 1973, when they left to write a best-selling biography of the
Rockefeller dynasty.
Called by the New
York Times Book Review “the premier biographers of American dynastic
tragedy,” Collier and Horowitz went on to write The Kennedys: An American
Drama (1984), which was a number one New York Times bestseller. This
was followed by The Fords: An American Epic (1987) and The
Roosevelts: An American Saga (1994). On his own, Collier went on to write The
Fondas: A Hollywood Dynasty, as well as a notable biography of Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, titled
Political Woman.
In the
mid-seventies, Collier and Horowitz both became disillusioned with the Left, an
intellectually courageous, slow-motion odyssey the pair recorded in their
1989 bestseller
Destructive Generation:
Second Thoughts About the Sixties, which made them enemies of their former comrades. While Horowitz became the more public face
of their apostasy, the more private Collier pursued an astonishingly prolific
career as an author, publishing numerous bestsellers in genres ranging from politics
to biographies to novels and screenplays, even short fiction.
Among the many
prestigious publications he wrote for are The Wall Street Journal, Commentary,
The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Playboy,
The New Republic, and The Weekly Standard.
In 1992, Collier conceived, named, and edited Heterodoxy magazine, the forerunner
of the FrontPage Magazine website, and also gave it it’s motto: “The Cultural
Equivalent of a Drive-by Shooting.” It was a pioneer publication in the fight
against Political Correctness. “For the next eight years, we attacked
the world of PC relentlessly, fingering its villains and forcing them to
do the perp walk,” Collier said of the controversial journal. “We named
names. We ridiculed the fatuous. We constructed an intellectual CT-scan of
the malignancy that was spreading throughout high culture. Heterodoxy was funny and
brash. It took no prisoners.”
In 1998 Collier
founded Encounter Books in California,
which swiftly became the premier publisher for powerhouse conservative thinkers
including Thomas Sowell, Andrew C. McCarthy, Heather Mac Donald, Michael Walsh,
Melanie Phillips, and many more. Collier was the editor at Encounter from 1998 to
2005, when he turned the reins over to Roger Kimball, and returned to work at
the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which he had co-founded with Horowitz in
1988.
Under the
leadership of Collier and Horowitz the Freedom Center has been the right’s foremost
“battle tank” in the war against the anti-American left. Collier edited the
Center’s unique and invaluable online encyclopedia of Leftist figures and
ideologies, DiscoverTheNetworks.org.
David Horowitz
offered this statement in tribute upon Collier’s passing:
On All Souls Day, we lost my best friend,
Peter Collier. Peter and I were brothers-in-arms for over fifty years. We
fought, we made up, and in the end each of us filled in the deficiencies of the
other. It was Peter who was the genius behind our best-selling dynastic
biographies, but I learned at his knees how to write biographies of my own,
which make up my best work. The co-authored book that most melded us into one
writer was Destructive Generation, about the terrible Sixties from which
our country has never recovered.
Peter was a generous and self-effacing man who
preferred the background to center-stage. As a consequence of that and of the
hatred which has consumed the literary culture and progressivism as a whole,
Peter was denied the recognition he deserved. He is the creator of two
influential institutions of the patriotic cause: the magazine Heterodoxy,
and the publishing house, Encounter Books. As the editor of
DiscovertheNetworks.org, he has also been the guiding hand behind this
indispensable encyclopedia of the Left.
His passing has created a hole that can never
be filled. But he was a connoisseur of life, and knew that time for all of us
must have its end.
Peter Collier leaves
behind a wife, two sons and five grandchildren, and a legacy of incalculable importance
and influence on American conservative thought. Requiescat in pace.
From FrontPage Mag, 11/4/19
