Cleveland Amory's Compleat Cat

Cleveland Amory is a humorist and humanitarian especially known for his books about animals and his animal advocacy. Amory was born in 1917 into a prominent New England family. Amory attended Harvard where he was president of the Harvard Crimson.

Upon graduation, Amory became the youngest editor ever of The Saturday Evening Post. He served in Army Intelligence in World War II and soon after the war wrote a trilogy of social history studies, including The Proper Bostonians, which is still in print 50 years later. He also wrote The Last Resorts and Who Killed Society? Amory was social commentator of the Today Show and chief critic of the TV Guide from 1963 to 1976. He wrote a weekly column for the Saturday Review and delivered a daily radio essay titled Curmudgeon at Large. Amory became senior contributing editor of Parade magazine in 1980.

In 1974 he wrote Man Kind? Our Incredible War on Wildlife, one of a few books ever to be awarded an editorial in The New York Times. This book inspired The Guns of Autumn, a CBS documentary on hunting. His books on cats include The Cat Who Came for Christmas, The Cat and the Curmudgeon, and The Best Cat Ever. In 1996 an anthology, Cat Tales: Classic Stories from Favorite Writers, joined his other cat books. Ranch of Dreams, published in 1997, tells the story of Black Beauty Ranch, a sanctuary and shelter for animals developed in East Texas by the Fund for Animals, which Amory founded in 1967.

Amory lives in New York. He visits Black Beauty Ranch often and continues to be active on behalf of animals.

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