John Chamberlain

John Rensselaer Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American journalist, the author of books on capitalism, and dubbed “one of America’s most trusted book reviewers.” Influenced by Albert Jay Nock, Chamberlain credited the writers Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson, and Rose Wilder Lane with his “conversion” to what he called “an older American philosophy” of libertarian ideas. Along with his friends Henry Hazlitt and Max Eastman, he helped to promote the work of F.A. Hayek, writing the foreword to the first American edition of The Road to Serfdom in 1944. In 1946, Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education established a free-market magazine named The Freeman, reviving the name of a publication that had been edited by Albert Jay Nock. Its first editors included Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt. After stepping down as editor, Chamberlain continued his regular column for the periodical, “A Reviewer’s Notebook.”