Victor S. Navasky, the author who served as editor and publisher of the progressive magazine The Nation, has died at 90, NPR reports.

Navasky, a Manhattan native, was educated at Swarthmore College and Yale Law School. He was the co-founder and editor of Monocle, a satirical magazine at Yale, and worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine as well as a columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

In 1978, he became editor of The Nation, the magazine that has been published since 1865. At the magazine, he worked with writers including Calvin Trillin and Christopher Hitchens.

In 1980, he published Naming Names, a nonfiction account of the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ investigation into alleged Communists in Hollywood. The book won the National Book Award; a critic for Kirkus wrote of it, “Navasky is right to remind us of the circumstances that fostered informing, along with other capitulations to tyranny.”

His other books include A Matter of Opinion and The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power.

Navasky’s admirers paid tribute to him on social media. On Twitter, Katrina vanden Heuvel, current publisher of The Nation, wrote, “Victor Navasky changed my life, and 1000s of others who embarked on their informal journalistic education at @thenation as interns. Victor was a true believer in the power of independent media—quietly fierce in his convictions, kind and generous to so very many. I will miss him.”

And journalist Ross Barkan tweeted, “RIP to Victor Navasky, who understood that liberalism meant welcoming a diversity of viewpoints and cherished idiosyncraticity. The Nation published Hitchens, Cockburn, Vidal, and many others who never fit neatly anywhere. Great writers shouldn’t.”

Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.