Joseph Epstein (born January 9, 1937 in Chicago) is an essayist, short story writer, and editor. From 1974 to 1998, he was the editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Society's The American Scholar magazine.

Biography

Epstein was born in a Jewish family in 1937. He graduated from Senn High School in Chicago and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He received a B.A. from the University of Chicago. He was a lecturer at Northwestern University from 1974 to 2002 and is an Emeritus Lecturer of English there.

He is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard and a long-time contributor of essays and short stories to The New Criterion and Commentary. In 2003, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

During his many years as editor of The American Scholar, Epstein was known for his essays, signed "Aristides", which led off each issue. Epstein's removal as editor in 1998 (following a 1996 vote of the Phi Beta Kappa senate) was controversial. Epstein later said that he was fired "for being insufficiently correct politically". Some within Phi Beta Kappa attributed the senate's decision to a desire to attract a younger readership for the journal, whose circulation had declined from 40,000 to 25,000 during Epstein's tenure.