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Richard F. Snow

Richard F. Snow worked 37 years at American Heritage Magazine, serving as Editor-in-Chief for seventeen of them. Born in New York City, he got a summer job as a mail boy at American Heritage during high school, and after studying English and history at Columbia College, returned to work at the magazine full-time. Snow is the author of several books, most recently A Measureless Peril, about the Battle of the Atlantic. Previously, he authored The Iron Road: A Portrait of American Railroading and Coney Island: A Postcard Visit to the City of Fire, as well as two novels, Freelon Starbird and The Burning, and a narrative poem, "The Funny Place." Snow has also consulted for historical motion pictures—among them Glory—and documentaries, including the Burns brothers’ The Civil War and Ken Burns’s World War II documentary. He revisited Coney one more time to work with Ric Burns on the PBS American Experience feature Coney Island, whose screenplay he wrote.

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

The port of Bruges lies eight miles inland from the Belgian coast, served by a canal that opens to the sea at Ostend and Zeebrugge. In the bitter spring of 1918 Bruges Harbor teemed with German destroyers and U-boats that regularly came out to continue their years-long effort to starve Britain into…
It’s back again, and six years of experience has taught me that it’s going to make some readers angry. Others will tell us it’s their favorite feature. Save for a now-distant cover story about Jane Fonda, nothing we’ve published has elicited such vehement responses as “Overrated & Underrated.”…
September 11, 2001, was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten—a new school a long subway ride up the spine of Manhattan. Rebecca’s inaugural school day consisted of half an hour meeting other children, followed by a four-hour walk home. When the school opened again, her teacher told me, “She’s…
One dour morning early this March I had to drive to eastern Pennsylvania. I’d heard that a patch of the sometime steel town of Bethlehem had been spruced up and now was a bower of postindustrial charm, so after my errand I made a detour and headed over to see it. I drove up a hill and across a…
The father of my colleague Carla Davidson was a newspaperman back in the racy violence of the Front Page days; he was also an accomplished novelist and television writer and a historian of wide interests. But he never could bring himself to care much about what he called “short-pants history,” by…