"[2] Bellows went on to attend Kenyon College, before serving as a Navy aviator, training to fly the F6F "Hellcat" in World War II.
[4] His eloquent, often humorous, and self-effacing style[5] attracted, nurtured, and often inspired a new generation of young writers including Judith Crist, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Denis Hamill, Gail Sheehy, Maureen Dowd and Tony Castro.
At the Herald Tribune, it was Bellows' initiative to hire Esquire editor Clay Felker and create a new Sunday supplement focused on local issues and events; within two years it became the still-popular New York magazine.
Richard Wald, Fred W. Friendly Professor of Professional Practice in Media and Society at Columbia University (and former ABC News "ethics czar")[6] said, “Jim changed the way a lot of newspapers look today, in the sense of making a page of newsprint more inviting and understandable.
In April 1963, Bellows published Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune.