Louis Fischer

(1896 - 1970)

Born in Philadelphia, Louis Fischer worked as a schoolteacher before joining a New York news agency in 1920. He moved to Moscow in 1922 and became a European correspondent for The Nation the following year. His first book, Oil Imperialism: The International Struggle for Petroleum, published in 1926, examined the influence of Russian oil reserves on geopolitics. “The average citizen may refuse to bother his brains about developments which will come only five or ten years hence,” Fischer wrote. “But big business is never so short-sighted, nor is high politics.”