In the summer of 2024, the Academy received a generous gift from the estate of the late Ronald L. Steel (1931-2023), a historian, writer, professor, and the Academy’s spring 2005 Bosch Fellow in Public Policy. For more than fifty years, with a style described by the New York Times as “astringent yet sparkling,” he was “one of the nation’s most prolific critics of America’s master plans for navigating a perilous, changing world.”

Born in Morris, Illinois, Steel earned degrees from Northwestern University and Harvard before joining the Army, and later the Foreign Service, stationed mainly in Europe, where he became a French translator. Returning to the US, he worked as an editor and published essays and books, including the definitive biography of the influential American journalist Walter Lippmann, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bancroft Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize for History, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Steel received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Woodrow Wilson Center, and Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin. He taught at Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, and the University of Southern California, among others.

The Academy is deeply honored that Steel chose to include our long-term security and success in his philanthropic legacy. For more information on how to support our mission with a planned gift, please visit americanacademy.de/support

This article was published in the 2024-25 Berlin Journal. 

Photo: Annette Hornischer / American Academy in Berlin