“Henry Luce wanted to create the most beautiful and riveting picture magazine ever published, and it was that. It was a magazine that could project a vision of what America was like, or at least what he wanted America to be like. Luce believed that under everything else there was a united America. There was a single culture that everyone was part of. And that’s what Life Magazine projected into the world, a sense of a kind of consensual America. That was not an accurate picture of what America was like.”
- Alan Brinkley, author of the book: The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Alan Brinkley: The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
In April 2010, Janet Maslin wrote “A Magazine Master Builder” for The New York Times. When Henry Luce graduated from the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut in 1916, he received not a single vote in the “most likely to succeed” category. That oversight remains amazing, not only because he would attain such eminence as Time Inc.’s founder and long-reigning autocrat but also because of what Luce, at 18, had already accomplished. At 14, the son of American Protestant missionaries in China, he had overweening ambitions. He had none of the advantages that his classmates’ money could buy, yet he was prepared to struggle past every social, financial and intellectual obstacle that stood between his schoolboy realities and grandiose dreams. By graduation he had found a wealthy mentor, become editor of a campus publication and boastfully labeled it “First in the Prep School World.” Luce’s success story would be sheer romance if it could surmount one basic problem: Luce himself. On the evidence of “The Publisher,” Alan Brinkley’s graceful and judicious biography, Luce began as an arrogant, awkward boy. He made up in pretension what he lacked in personal charm, and he was “able to attract the respect but not usually the genuine affection of those around him.”
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