Peter Collier

Peter Anthony Dale Collier (; born June 2, 1939) is an American writer and publisher. He was the founding publisher of Encounter Books in California and held that position from 1998 until he resigned in 2005. The company moved from San Francisco to New York City, and Collier was replaced as publisher by Roger Kimball. He continues as a consultant to the company. With David Horowitz, Collier wrote multiple books that made the New York Times Best Seller list and was called by the New York Times Book Review, "the premier biographer of American dynastic tragedy." His book Medal of Honor: Profiles of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty (2003) profiles living recipients of the Medal. Collier was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966 when he became an editor at Ramparts magazine, the splashy, four-color publication that was influential in transmitting New Left ideas into the mainstream. Collier wrote about the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement and other radical organizations for Ramparts. He edited Ramparts until 1972. As the Vietnam War came to an end, he and fellow Ramparts writer David Horowitz became disillusioned when the New Left turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the communist victors in Southeast Asia—the tiger cages and boat people in South Vietnam, the genocide in Cambodia. They began a slow motion political transition that led them away from the Left and ultimately made them, in their own term, "second thoughters" engaged in ongoing political combat with their former comrades. Collier and Horowitz traveled to Nicaragua in 1987 at the invitation of the State Department to encourage the "civic resistance" against the Sandinistas. The same year they organized a "Second Thoughts Convention" in Washington D.C. Their book about leaving the Left and becoming its enemies, Destructive Generation (1989), was compared to Whittaker Chambers' Witness.He has served as a co-author with Horowitz on several books on American history and