Peter Collier, "a prolific writer who midway into his career made a high-profile ideological shift from left to right, becoming a leading conservative voice as well as a publisher of others," died November 1, the New York Times reported. He was 80. Collier, who often wrote with David Horowitz, "was well regarded as a biographer of dynastic families."
They co-wrote The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976), The Kennedys: An American Drama (1984) and The Fords: An American Epic (1987), and in 1994 Collier published The Roosevelts: An American Saga, with Horowitz contributing. In addition, Collier wrote a novel, Down River (1979); a children's book, The King's Giraffe (with his wife, 1996); and books honoring military figures like Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty (2003).
During the 1960s and '70s, Collier and Horowitz worked together on the New Left journal Ramparts, but "made a 180-degree turn and began writing books and articles from the conservative side of the spectrum," the Times noted. Their 1989 book, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties, attacked what they perceived to be the nostalgia that had grown up around that decade.
In 1998, Collier founded Encounter Books, which has published a range of authors, many of them conservative, the Times wrote, adding that "Collier saw a link between his early days on the left, opposing the status quo, and his later career as his own polar opposite, arguing against what he called the 'feel-good ideology' of political correctness."
"We are the counterculture," he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. "We're the people in opposition to what Orwell called the smelly little orthodoxies."