Born on January 8, 1919, in Newark, N.J., Selznick earned his undergraduate degree from City College of New York in 1938. In college, he joined and sometimes led a radical Trotskyite youth organization and met such future luminaries as Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and his first wife, Gertrude Jaeger.