Mr. Playboy, Steven Watts
Mr. Playboy, Steven Watts
List: $27.95 | Sale: $19.57
Club: $13.97

Mr. Playboy
Hugh Hefner and the American Dream

Author: Steven Watts

Narrator: Ray Porter

Unabridged: 18 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/06/2008

Synopsis

When Hugh Hefner quit his job at Esquire to start a magazine called Playboy, he didnt just want to make money, he wanted to make dreams come true. The first issue had a Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an article on the Dorsey brothers, and a feature on desk design for the modern office. Hefner wrote much of the copy himself and drew all the cartoons. But the most memorable part by far was the set of pictures he bought from a local calendar printer of a scantily clad Marilyn Monroe. In this wise and penetrating biography, intellectual historian Steven Watts looks at what Hugh Hefner went on to become and how he took America with him. Hefner became one of the most hated and envied celebrities in America, standing just barely on the wrong side of decencywith as many as seven million subscribers to his magazine.

About Steven Watts

Steven Watts is a professor of history at the University of Missouri. He is the author of The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century and The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life.

Reviews

Goodreads review by britt_brooke on July 21, 2018

From a business, societal, and social standpoint, this is utterly fascinating. But Hefner himself was a walking, talking, screwing contradiction.......more

Goodreads review by Elizabeth on January 09, 2011

hefner is certainly a cultural player worthy of a thoughtful biography; however, i remain unconvinced that mr. playboy needed its full 453 pages. my biggest complaint was the wordiness, the repetitiveness. i felt the book could have been shortened by at least 100 pgs. entire chapters felt unnecessar......more

Goodreads review by Chessmen on May 01, 2013

I found it funny that the same author of Mr.Playboy also wrote a biography on Walt Disney. Clearly he sees them both as iconic American entertainers who transformed their societies through the creation of their personal fantasies. Hefner never published his own autobiography in whole, so this is the......more

Goodreads review by Bunny on May 18, 2009

Hugh Hefner is a douchebag. If you know this already, and you know that the grotto exists, you don't need to read the book. Okay, that's not really fair. The book has a lot of interesting information from the start of the magazine. I wasn't so much interested in Hefner as I was in the origins of the......more

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