Before moving to the United States in 1984, he was the Editor of The Sunday Times for fourteen years from 1967, and the Editor of The Times from 1981 until 1982. His account of these years was published in 1983 in Good Times, Bad Times, which went on to become a number one bestseller in the U.K.

Harold Evans first made his reputation as the Editor of The Northern Echo, the leading provincial newspaper, where his campaigns won a national program for the detection of cervical cancer and a pardon for a man wrongly executed for murder. He had begun his career in journalism at the age of sixteen at a weekly newspaper, but after service in the Royal Air Force earned an M.A. degree at Durham University with honors in politics and economics, and was later awarded a Harkness Fellowship for travel in the U.S. He studied at the Universities of Chicago and Stanford, and has subsequently been awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Durham and Stirling.

Named Editor of the Year in 1973, following The Sunday Times Thalidomide campaign, Harold Evans was awarded the European Gold Medal of the Institute of Journalists after his successful appeal to the European Court of Human Rights against the suppression of the Thalidomide articles.

He was Campaigning Journalist of the Year in 1967, International Editor of the Year in 1976. He ended his year at The Times shortly after being named Editor of the Year by Granada Television’s “What The Papers Say.” In this period he wrote a five-volume manual entitled Editing and Design, which became the standard work for the training of journalists. His volumes on English and photojournalism are in their 25th year of continuous publication.

On leaving The Times, Evans became a director of Goldcrest Films and Television from 1982 to 1984. In 1984 he accepted an invitation to teach a course on the press, the law and the constitution at Duke University as a visiting professor at Duke. Later in 1984, he was appointed editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Monthly Press publishing house and subsequently also editorial director of U.S. News and World Report. In 1986, he was the founding editor-in-chief of Conde Nast Traveler.

Harold Evans was variously: the first outside broadcast presenter for Granada Television in the U.K., the presenter of the educational program “Afternoon Edition,” the chairman of Tyne-Tees Television’s town hall meetings series, a commentator for five years on Granada’s “What the Papers Say,” and the author and presenter of various BBC television series, notably“Evans on Newspapers” and “Evans on Photography.”

In January 2000, Mr. Evans began work on two volumes to be published by Little, Brown: A prequel to The American Century, to be titled The Innovators. WGBH in Boston is making a four-part TV series based on the book.