Seldes, George

Seldes, George

(born Nov. 16, 1890, Alliance, N.J., U.S.—died July 2, 1995, Hartland Four Corners, Vt.) U.S. journalist. He became a reporter in 1909. From 1918 to 1928 he worked for the Chicago Tribune, then quit to pursue independent journalism. In You Can't Print That (1928) he criticized censorship and strictures on journalists, a continuing theme in his career. He reported on the rise of fascism in Italy and Spain in the 1930s, and he and his wife published In Fact, a journal devoted to press criticism, in the years 1940–50. His other targets included the tobacco industry and J. Edgar Hoover. He published his memoirs, Witness to a Century, in 1987. His brother, the critic Gilbert Seldes (1893–1970), was managing editor of The Dial during the 1920s. George Seldes's best-known book was The Seven Lively Arts (1924). He was a columnist for the New York Evening Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, film critic for The New Republic, first director of television for CBS News, and first dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication.