Tom Bethell

Mr. Tom Bethell is a senior editor at the American Spectator. He has also been Washington editor of Harper’s, and an editor of the Washington Monthly. He has written for many magazines, including Fortune, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly. For the last twenty-eight years, he has written a monthly article on a wide range of subjects for the American Spectator. He has been a columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the Washington Star.

In 1998, he published The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages (St. Martin’s Press). Writer and analyst George Gilder has said that Bethell “commands the most eloquent prose in American journalism. Here he addresses the most crucial enigmas of life and history — from the real reasons for the Irish famine to the nature of intellectual property.” In 1988, a collection of his essays was published under the title The Electric Windmill. Tom Wolfe wrote that the book “establishes Tom Bethell as one of our most brilliant essayists.”

A graduate of Oxford University, where he studied philosophy, physiology, and psychology, Mr. Bethell came to the United States after graduating in 1962. His great interest at the time was New Orleans jazz and its origins. His book on this subject was published by the University of California Press in 1977. Mr. Bethell is married to Donna Fitzpatrick Bethell. They live in Washington, D.C.