The Longest Trail: Writings on American Indian History, Culture, and Politics (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780345806918)

Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. was born in 1915 in New York. He went to school at Horace Mann and Harvard, worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, a print and radio journalist in New York, and as a World War II Marine Corps combat correspondent in the Pacific; his recording of the amphibious landing at Guam was broadcast nationwide. After the war he became an editor at Time magazine and then American Heritage. On assignment with Time in Idaho in the early 1950s, he discovered the Nez Perce. That meeting changed his life--and that of many others. Fifty years of books and articles on Indian and western history followed. He was also a technical advisor on the film Little Big Man, a noted book and magazine editor, and an advocate for Indians. Josephy worked with Stewart Udall in the Kennedy administration, wrote an influential Indian "white paper" for the Nixon administration, and served as chair of the founding board of the National Museum of the American Indian. Many of his books remain in print. Alvin and his wife, Betty, bought a small ranch in the heart of Nez Perce Country in eastern Oregon in 1963, where the family spent summers for more than forty years. Alvin died in 2005, a year after Betty's passing.