Early Years
Stone was born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who owned a store in Haddonfield, New Jersey. His sister is journalist and film critic Judy Stone. He studied philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer as a student.
Stone attended Haddonfield Memorial High School, where he ultimately graduated ranked 49th in his class of 52. He started his own newspaper, the Progress, as a high school sophomore. He later worked for the Haddonfield Press and the Camden Courier-Post. After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the Philadelphia Inquirer, then known as the "Republican Bible of Pennsylvania". Influenced by the work of Jack London, he became a radical journalist. He joined the Inquirer’s morning rival, the Philadelphia Record, owned by liberal Democrat J. David Stern, and he moved to the New York Post after Stern bought that paper during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, he played an active role in the Communist-dominated Popular Front opposition to Adolf Hitler. But in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939 Stone wrote to a friend saying “no more fellow traveling” and used his column in The Nation to denounce Stalin as “the Moscow Machiavelli who suddenly found peace as divisible as the Polish plains and marshes”.
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