Max Lerner

Max Lerner was a gifted writer and educator whose passion for life made him anything but an ivory tower recluse. In public he was a prominent commentator and college professor, in private, a romantic adventurer. He had two marriages and six children and became a close friend and frequent guest of Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion West. One of his liasons was with Elizabeth Taylor - who fondly referred to him as "my little professor". During the 1930s Lerner was an anti-fascist "popular front progressive" writing for the "Nation" and the "New Republic". Then from the 1940s through the 1970s he became the country's leading liberal columnist, first with the "PM" and later with the "New York Post". In the 1980s, however, he was repelled by the New Left and the counterculture and joined the ranks of the neoconservatives, insisting to his scandalized readers that he must tell the truth as he saw it. This biography begins with Lerner's own account of the hardships his family endured emigrating from Russia. Sanford Lakoff traces Lerner's American pilgrimage from his education at Yale where he experienced anti-Semitism, through his years as a radical inspired by Thorstein Veblen, into maturity as a widely read columnist, teacher, father and an unapologetic romantic who liked to say that he never learned anything worth knowing except from women.