Todd Alan Gitlin (January 6, 1943 – February 5, 2022) was an American sociologist, political activist and writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He wrote about the mass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly publications. Background Todd Alan Gitlin was born on January 6, 1943, in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, the son of Dorothy (Siegel), who taught typing and stenography, and Max Gitlin, who taught high school history. His family was Jewish. He graduated as valedictorian from the Bronx High School of Science at the age of 16. Enrolling at Harvard College, he graduated in 1963 with an A.B. cum laude in mathematics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After his leadership in Students for a Democratic Society, he earned an M.A. in political science from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Personal life and death Gitlin lived in Manhattan and Hillsdale, New York. He was married three times: his first two marriages, to activist and lawyer Nancy Hollander and to Carol Wolman, ended in divorce, and his third, to Laurel Ann Cook, lasted from 1995 until his death. On December 31, 2021, Gitlin went into cardiac arrest at his home in Hillsdale and was hospitalized in nearby Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he contracted COVID-19. He died on February 5, 2022, at the age of 79. Career Activism Gitlin became a political activist in 1960, when he joined a Harvard undergraduate group called Tocsin, against nuclear weapons. He went on to become vice-chairman and then chairman of the group. He helped organize a national demonstration in Washington, February 16–17, 1962, against the arms race and nuclear testing. In 1963 and 1964, Gitlin was president of Students for a Democratic Society. He helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War, held in Washington, D.C., April 17, 1965, with 25,000 participants, as well as the first civil disobedience directed against American corporate support for the apartheid regime in South Africa—a sit-in at the Manhattan headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank on March 19, 1965. In 1968 and 1969, he was an editor at and a contributor to the San Francisco Express Times, an underground newspaper, and wrote regularly for underground papers via Liberation News Service. In the mid-1980s, he was a leader of Berkeley's Faculty for Full Divestment and president of Harvard-Radcliffe Alumni/-ae Against Apartheid.