The master publisher

A biography of Henry Luce,Time Inc.s founder and long-reigning autocrat,follows his life and times judiciously....

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 achieved.

He had arrived in the United States at 14,the son of American Protestant missionaries in China. He had overweening ambitions even then,along with a highly developed sense of his own importance. He had none of the advantages that his classmates money could buy,and knew so little about American popular culture that prep school slang was alien to him. 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 and become editor of a campus publication.

Luces success story would be sheer romance if it could surmount one basic problem: Luce himself. On the evidence of The Publisher,Alan Brinkleys graceful and judicious biography,Luce began as an arrogant,awkward boy and did not grow any more beguiling as his fortunes rose. Still,his fierce determination,grounded in his fathers missionary rectitude and sense of purpose,could never be ignored he died in 1967. Brinkley makes a cogent case for why Luces story and the sometimes controversial history of his frankly partisan publishing empire deserve to be seen in a new light.

While still a student,Luce met his polar opposite and future business partner,the gregarious and fun-loving Briton Hadden. These two were bound for glory,though they stopped en route for stints in the Army and at Yale. By the time they left college,they had made enough valuable connections to last a lifetime. Or,in their case,to drum up sufficient money and interest to create what they called a weekly news-magazine: Time.

After this week, Luce wrote in 1923 as Times debut drew near,its head-on either to glory or perdition. One of the most impressive aspects of The Publisher is its scrupulous attention to both the glory and the folly surrounding Time Inc. Though Luce would grow entirely comfortable using his magazines as mouthpieces,neither he nor anyone else was always certain what he thought.

I am most uncertain of the meaning you intend to convey, wrote the Luce-friendly Time helped popularise that kind of hyphenate modifier,now ubiquitous President Eisenhower,on Luces vague fulminations about the rule of law.

What Luce was sure about,right from the first,was what Time should be: cogent,compartmentalised,clear and altogether alliterative. Its language,as Brinkley entertainingly illustrates,was rooted in the two founders classical education and ran amok imitating Homerisms like wine-dark sea. Its style was so infectious that Luces mother,when preparing to leave China,wrote: As Time would say,America looms.

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The Publisher follows the cultural attitudes of Time,Fortune,Life and eventually Sports Illustrated over drastically changing times. It does not dwell unduly on the gaffes,but they could be awful. From a March of Time radio broadcast featuring nut-brown little Mahatma Gandhi in an imaginary encounter with swooning American women: Oh Mahatma,when are you coming to America? Theyll go wild about you there 8230; simply wild.. Another important Time Inc. misstep found it jovially dismissing the rise of Hitler.

Brinkley is dauntless in assessing Luces most important accomplishments,like his American Century essay and other efforts to tell Americans what American life was like. Now that the world is so different from anything Henry Luce could imagine,his life and times are more poignant than they once seemed.