John Dennis McDonald (December 5, 1906 – December 23, 1998) was an American journalist, writer, editor, business historian, fisherman, and horse racing enthusiast.

After being a radicalTrotzkyite in the 1930s, McDonald joinedFortune magazine's staff in 1945, writing articles and later books about, among other topics, business, economics, games and gambling, and fly fishing.

McDonald's best-known work isMy Years With General Motors, the memoir ofAlfred P. Sloan Jr., the visionary executive who was CEO ofGM from 1923 to 1956. After completing the manuscript in 1959, McDonald entered a strenuous five-year battle to secure its publication, as GM sought to suppress the memoir, fearing it could be leveraged by theJustice Department to launch anantitrust case against the company.

McDonald's long and successful legal battle against GM became the subject of his later bookA Ghost's Memoir. Finally published in 1964, the Sloan book became a timeless bestseller, widely recognized as one of the most significant works on business.

McDonald was married to the noted artistDorothy Eisner. He died of respiratory failure in December 1999, he was 92 years old.^[1]

• 1976Gerald Loeb Memorial Award for excellence in business journalism^[2]

• McDonald, John; Seligman, Dan (2003).A ghost's memoir: the making of Alfred P. Sloan's My Years with General Motors. Boston, Massachusetts, US:MIT Press.ISBN 978-0-262-63285-0.
• Sloan, Alfred P. (1964), McDonald, John (ed.),My Years with General Motors, Garden City, NY, US: Doubleday,LCCN 64011306,OCLC 802024.Republished in 1990 with a new introduction byPeter Drucker (ISBN 978-0385042352).

John McDonald Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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