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Welcome to the Walter Karp Library! The site was created to celebrate the life and writing of my father, Walter Karp (1934-1989), a noted freelance political writer and historian. Though he’s been gone for over 30 years, much of his writing remains in print. Harper’s magazine posthumously published an excellent collection of his articles, Buried Alive Essays on our Endangered Republic, which is an excellent entry point if you are new to his writing. They have also kept his three political books in print: Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America (1973), The Politics of War (1979), and Liberty Under Siege: American Politics, 1976-1988 (1989).
This digital library also includes a complete bibliography of his published writing with links to all his article that are currently available online, several articles about my father, and a complete archive of The Public Life, a bi-weekly journal of politics that my father published from 1968-1971. If you would like to hear my father’s voice and independent political thinking, I recommend listening to Studs Terkel’s interview in June 1989. At the end of the interview, Studs asked my father if he was feeling okay. My father admitted that he was not and Studs, being a real mensch, offered to personally drive him to O’Hare. He would soon be admitted to the hospital and, just three weeks after that radio interview, he was dead. It was a tremendous loss for me and my family, and for the American republic he loved. I hope you enjoy this site dedicated to his memory.
– Roy Karp, July 2023
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