Joseph Fels Barnes

Barnes was born in 1907. he graduated from Harvard University in 1927, where he was managing editor and president of the Harvard Crimson. He studied at the London School of Slavonic Studies.[1]

Barnes worked on staff in the Soviet Union and China at the Institute of Pacific Relations from 1932 to 1934. He was a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune based in Moscow, Berlin, and New York from 1934 to 1948. That was interrupted by service as director of the Office of War Information overseas branch and Voice of America radio show (1941-1944).

Barnes was an editor of PM, which he bought from Marshall Field II with Bartley Crum and renamed New York Star. Barnes remained editor until the Star folded in 1949.[1]

Later, Barnes worked as an editor of Simon & Schuster and was a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College[2]

Often affiliated with left-wing causes, Barnes was accused in the 1950s of being a member of the Communist Party USA by several witnesses, e.g., Whittaker Chambers (1951):

Whittaker Chambers, confessed former Communist courier, said that a Red leader in 1937 told him that Joseph Barnes, a member of the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College, was a member of a Communist underground cell in New York. Mr. Chambers identified his informant as J. Peters... Mr. Barnes, former foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune and former secretary of the American Institute of Pacific Relations who is now an editor of Simon & Schuster, New York publishers, denied the accusation – as he has on three previous occasions....[2]

Barnes died in 1970 of cancer in New York City.

• PEN Translation Prize for The Story Of A Life

Barnes translated The Story Of A Life by Konstantin Paustovsky.