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.

"A solid account of Luce's life and legacy... A concise, readable volume." -- Journalism Quarterly

How Henry R. Luce used his famous magazines to advance his interventionist agenda.

In Time, Life, and Fortune, Henry Luce invented three entirely new forms of journalism. They changed our country, largely for the better, and made Luce a very wealthy man. But his patriotic zeal and his obsessions with China, Communism, and Republican Party politics led him to ignore and distort inconvenient facts to make his case, irreparably tarnishing his legacy. His stunning successes, and his self-inflicted wounds, hold lessons for every leader. He invented the modern news magazine and named it Time, revolutionized the coverage of business with a publication he called Fortune, captured the world in pictures and christened it Life. His publications were read by fully a quarter of the U.S. population, and his ideas about journalism and the significance of American values left an indelible imprint on the history of the United States and the world. He was Henry Robinson Luce. Luce was America’s most powerful mass communicator for more than 40 years. Yet, he was an odd, contradictory man with few real friends and talents that were both more and less than they seemed. His private life was largely a failure, and his missionary zeal was never quite realized. New Word City, publishers of digital originals, contributes 10 percent of its profits to literacy causes.