The Publisher, Alan Brinkley
The Publisher, Alan Brinkley
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The Publisher
Henry Luce and His American Century

Author: Alan Brinkley

Narrator: Sean Runnette

Unabridged: 21 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/22/2010


Synopsis

As the founder of Time, Fortune, and Life magazines, Henry Luce changed the way we consume news and the way we understand our world. Born the son of missionaries, 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.

Historian Alan 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.

About Alan Brinkley

Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins Professor of American History at Columbia University. His books include Voices of Protest, which won the National Book Award for History, and The Unfinished Nation. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, and other publications. He lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Blog on Books on July 26, 2010

Alan Brinkley’s historical profile of Time magazine founder, Henry Luce, is as much a history of a titan of industry as it is an overview of the global and political times of what Luce himself referred to as ‘the American Century.’ Brinkley (who has written extensively on FDR and penned a series of......more

Goodreads review by Kenna on October 16, 2023

Great read! I knew nothing about Luce before picking up this book. And all I knew of Time/Life was that they were periodicals. This book really drew me in and shines a fascinating light on the first half of the 20th century.......more

Goodreads review by MichelleCH on February 08, 2020

Great story and history of major publications. Just boring and so dry. So much wasted potential.......more

Goodreads review by Bookmarks Magazine on June 16, 2010

Invariably drawing comparisons with the political slant of his subject's magazines, reviewers praised Alan Brinkley's evenhandedness in The Publisher. They portrayed the book as an antidote not only to earlier, more negative biographies but to a generation that cannot comprehend the influence once h......more

Goodreads review by alix on August 11, 2011

Although at times long-winded and slightly repetitive, this biography of the founder of Time, Inc., provided an interesting glimpse into the history of journalism and showed how one man, with the help of his print empire, attempted to influence and guide middle-class American thinking at mid-century......more