Jonathan Schell

(1943 - 2014)

Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth outlined the consequences of nuclear armament. “Usually, people wait for things to occur before trying to describe them,” he writes in the book, “but since we cannot afford under any circumstances to let a holocaust occur, we are forced in this one case to become the historians of the future—to chronicle and commit to memory an event that we have never experienced.” Schell taught at Yale and regularly wrote for The Nation and The New Yorker.