User:Vaticidalprophet/Edmund Stevens

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/27/world/edmund-stevens-81-a-reporter-in-moscow-for-40-years-is-dead.html (archive: https://archive.md/CLiWt) https://www.csmonitor.com/1992/0605/05192.html obit https://www.csmonitor.com/1995/0411/11031.html communism https://www-newspapers-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/image/712608303/?terms=%22edmund%20stevens%22&match=1 son claims not communist https://www-newspapers-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/image/695530906/?terms=%22edmund%20stevens%22&match=1 criticism of china reporting

Early life
Edmund Stevens was born July 22, 1910, in Denver, Colorado. His father, the head of the Colorado Medical Society, died when Stevens was a toddler; his mother Florence ( Ballance) lived a peripatetic lifestyle, bringing her son with her to Italy in 1913, where he lived until the age of nine. The family continued travelling upon their return to the States, and Stevens changed schools on an annual basis throughout his childhood. Stevens was praised at school for his writing skill, but his educational career was disrupted when he was expelled from the Kent School aged thirteen for a controversial poem entitled "Ode to the Odious". He returned to Rome the summer following his expulsion, travelling with a friend with the blessing of his mother. Stevens later remarked that this period formed his lifelong identity as an expatriate; according to his memoirs, he "began to feel almost more Italian than anything else". The teenaged Stevens also developed an admiration for Benito Mussolini, praising what he saw as the dictator's "semblance of order" upon a country then dominated by "regional antagonisms".

Stevens returned to America at the request of his mother, who wanted him to complete his education. At sixteen he enrolled in a cram school in New York City to accelerate the completion of his high school credits. He also deepened his connections with fascism, joining a Bronx-based organization that held regular demonstrations and brawled with local antifascist groups. Two of Stevens' associates were killed in one such brawl; the funeral was attended by local Italian diplomats.

In 1927, Stevens was admitted to Columbia University to study economics. He was distracted by social pursuits, described by his biographer Cheryl Heckler as "too busy attending debutante balls [and] perfecting his recipe for bathtub gin" to study. Around this time, Stevens' ideological fascinations switched from fascism to communism, involving himself in left-wing student movements and demonstrations. Stevens graduated from Columbia in 1932, the same year he met and fell in love with a Hungarian woman ten years his senior. The two married after a brief courtship and moved to Bennington, Vermont, where she worked as a teacher. Stevens was attempting to pursue graduate study in economics at this time, and to this end he made long regular commutes from Bennington to New York. Both the relationship and the studies rapidly disintegrated.