Chris Welles

Christopher Jewett Welles (December 11, 1937 – June 19, 2010) was an American business journalist who wrote for Life, BusinessWeek, The Saturday Evening Post and the Los Angeles Times, in addition to a number of books on business topics. Welles headed the Walter Bagehot Fellowship Program in Business and Economics Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Early life and education

Welles was born on December 11, 1937, in Boston and adopted by textile salesman Clement Welles and his wife Grace Blauvelt Welles, a pediatrician. He graduated with an A.B. in politics from Princeton University in 1959 after completing a senior thesis titled "The Navy and Public Relations." After graduating from Princeton, Welles was commissioned as an ensign in the United States Navy and assigned to the USS Midway (CV-41). He served until 1962 and became a lieutenant (junior grade).

Career

After completing his military service, he was hired as a researcher by Life magazine. An article he had written about the neglect of American oil shale reserves by the petroleum industry that Life turned down was expanded into book form and published in 1970 as The Elusive Bonanza: The Story of Oil Shale, America's Richest and Most Neglected Natural Resource. Life fired him after he sold the piece to Harper's Magazine. His 1975 book The Last Days of the Club documented the decline and fall of old Wall Street institutions and the ascendancy of new companies that would come to replace them.

Welles joined the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1977, where he headed the Walter Bagehot Fellowship Program in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia, which would later be renamed the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship Program.