Purchase
Henry Luce and his American Century
Knopf
April 2010
On Sale: April 20, 2010
Featuring: Henry Luce
560 pages
ISBN: 0679414444
EAN: 9780679414445
Paperback
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Non-Fiction Biography
Acclaimed historian Alan Brinkley gives us a sharply
realized portrait of Henry Luce, arguably the most important
publisher of the twentieth century.
As the founder of
Time, Fortune, and Life magazines, Luce
changed the way we consume news and the way we understand
our world. Born the son of missionaries, Henry Luce spent
his childhood in rural China, yet he glimpsed a milieu of
power altogether different at Hotchkiss and later at Yale.
While working at a Baltimore newspaper, he and Brit Hadden
conceived the idea of Time: a “news-magazine” that
would condense the week’s events in a format accessible to
increasingly busy members of the middle class. They launched
it in 1923, and young Luce quickly became a publishing
titan. In 1936, after Time’s unexpected success—and
Hadden’s early death—Luce published the first issue of
Life, to which millions soon
subscribed.
Brinkley shows how Luce reinvented the
magazine industry in just a decade. The appeal of
Life seemingly cut across the lines of race, class,
and gender. Luce himself wielded influence hitherto unknown
among journalists. By the early 1940s, he had come to see
his magazines as vehicles to advocate for America’s
involvement in the escalating international crisis, in the
process popularizing the phrase “World War II.” In spite of
Luce’s great success, happiness eluded him. His second
marriage—to the glamorous playwright, politician, and
diplomat Clare Boothe—was a shambles. Luce spent his later
years in isolation, consumed at times with conspiracy
theories and peculiar vendettas.
The
Publisher tells a great American story of spectacular
achievement—yet it never loses sight of the public and
private costs at which that achievement came.
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