• Author of Internet blog TomDispatch, a project of The Nation Institute 
• Longtime publishing industry veteran, currently a consulting editor at Metropolitan Books 
• Editor of the book Marx for Beginners 
• Named a “teaching fellow” at University of California Berkeley Journalism School whose Dean is Berkeley radical Orville Schell   
• Author of The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusionment of a Generation

Tom Engelhardt administers and writes for the blog TomDispatch, a project of the The Nation Institute. He was born and raised in New York City during the 1950s as the son of a cartoonist mother who was involved in publishing. He studied Chinese history and culture at Yale University and, as a graduate student, at Harvard University.

Engelhardt recalls how the radical spirit of the 1960s shaped his personality and worldview:

"Like a lot of people, it [the Sixties] had the impact of turning me a little inside-out. In the Fifties I spent, like many middle class white boys (and maybe a lot of other people), a lot of time looking toward a horizon that didn't seem to be there, wondering when something would happen. The Sixties, it was like the earth opening up; you could just jump in. I did, more or less, in my own way, and distinctly within the bounds of who I was.

"First, I organized: I was part of the draft resistance movement. I organized against the war. I was swept out of graduate school entirely and became a printer, a so-called 'movement' or underground printer, although we weren't underground at all."

Around 1970, Engelhardt was recruited by professor Orville Schell in Berkeley, California to work for his newly created anti-Vietnam War project, Pacific News Service.

Engelhardt has authored several books, including The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusionment of a Generation, first published in 1995. This book argues that America’s national identity is based largely on conquest, and that the country's central cultural narrative has always been “the story of their slaughter and our triumph.”

Engelhardt is also the author of Beyond Our Control: America in the Mid Seventies (1976); The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel (2003); and The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (2008). The latter is a collection of articles from Engelhardt's website, devoted in large measure to criticisms of the George W. Bush administration.

Engelhardt has edited such books as Marx for Beginners (published by Pantheon Books in 2003); History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (published by Holt Paperbacks in 1996); and The Unconquerable World (authored in 2004 by Jonathan Schell, brother of Orville Schell, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism dean who would later hire Engelhardt as a “teaching fellow” at his school.

Engelhardt is currently a consulting editor of Metropolitan Books' "American Empire Project," which laments that "[a]t this moment of unprecedented economic and military strength, the leaders of the United States have embraced imperial ambitions openly."

According to Engelhardt, the U.S. under the George W. Bush administration established an "offshore mini-gulag of penal camps." "Everybody knows Guantanamo," he said, "but it's much more extensive than that, and almost unwritten about. One of those holding facilities is at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan."

Characterizing the war on terror as an ill-conceived, misguided venture against a largely imaginary enemy, Engelhardt writes:

"After 9/11, George W. Bush and his top advisers almost instantly launched their crusade against Islam and then their wars, all under the rubric of the 'global war on terror.' ... In the process, they would treat bin Laden’s scattered al-Qaida network as if it were the Nazi or Soviet war machine (even comically dubbing his followers 'Islamofascists'). In the blinking of an eye, and in the rubble of two enormous buildings in downtown Manhattan, bin Laden and his cronies had morphed from nobodies into supermen, a Legion of Doom."