Nathan Irving Hentoff (June 10, 1925 – January 7, 2017) was an American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and syndicated columnist for United Media. Hentoff was a columnist for The Village Voice from 1958 to 2009. Following his departure from The Village Voice, Hentoff became a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and continued writing his music column for The Wall Street Journal, which published his works until his death. He often wrote on First Amendment issues, vigorously defending the freedom of the press. Hentoff was formerly a columnist for: Down Beat, JazzTimes, Legal Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Progressive, Editor & Publisher and Free Inquiry. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker, and his writings were also published in: The New York Times, Jewish World Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Commonweal, and Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo. Early life Hentoff was born on June 10, 1925, in Boston, Massachusetts, the firstborn child of Simon, a traveling salesman, and Lena (née Katzenberg). His parents were Jewish Russian immigrants. As a teen, Hentoff attended Boston Latin School and worked for Frances Sweeney on the Boston City Reporter, investigating antisemitic hate groups. Sweeney was a major influence on Hentoff; his memoir, Boston Boy, is dedicated to her. He played soprano saxophone and clarinet as a youth, and became interested in jazz after listening to Artie Shaw play. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors, in 1946 from Northeastern University. That same year he enrolled for graduate study at Harvard University. In 1950, he attended Sorbonne University in Paris, France, on a Fulbright Scholarship. Career Hentoff began his career in broadcast journalism while hosting a weekly jazz program on Boston radio station WMEX. In the 1940s, he hosted two radio shows on WMEX: JazzAlbum and From Bach to Bartók. In the early 1950s he continued to present a jazz program on WMEX, and as a Staff Announcer for WMEX, he regularly hosted remote broadcasts from the Savoy, and Storyville, two Boston clubs run by George Wein, and during that period was an announcer on the program Evolution of Jazz on WGBH-FM. In 2013, the Evolution of Jazz series was contributed to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting by the University of Maryland's National Public Broadcasting Archives as part of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) collection. By the late 1950s, he was co-hosting