Literary Digest A Repository Of Contemporaneous Thought And Research As Presented In The Periodical Literature Of The World

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.

The 1913 murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan would have far-reaching consequences for Georgia and the nation; in the years that followed a Jewish man named Leo Frank was convicted on dubious evidence, a governor's career toppled while an anti-Semite became Georgia's senator, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith was formed. The Silent and The Damned: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank tells the horrifying story of how a trial spiraled into mob violence and propaganda campaigns against Jews in the South. The authors, Robert Seitz Frey and Nancy Thompson-Frey, detail the trial that portrayed Frank, the superintendent at the pencil factory where Phagan was employed, as a sexual misfit and killer. The authors describe the responses from and against the Jewish community in Atlanta, and reactions from religious groups and the press across the country. Frey and Thompson also tell of how new evidence from a witness who stayed silent for years brought the case back under scrutiny in the 1980s, leading to a posthumous pardon for Frank. John Seigenthaler, publisher of the Nashville Tennessean and a leader in the efforts to clear Frank's name, provides the introduction.