Luce And His Empire

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972. First Edition (Scribner's A on verso). Hardcover. Good/Good. Christopher Lukas (author photograph). xiii, [1], 529, [1] pages. Illustrations, Notes. Author's Notes. Index. William Andrew Swanberg (November 23, 1907 in St. Paul, Minnesota - September 17, 1992 in Southbury, Connecticut) was an American biographer. He is known for Citizen Hearst, a biography of William Randolph Hearst, which was recommended by the Pulitzer Prize board in 1962 but overturned by the trustees. He won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1972 biography of Henry Luce, and the National Book Award in 1977 for his 1976 biography of Norman Thomas. He followed a college friend to New York City in September 1935. After months of anxious job-hunting he secured an interview at the Dell Publishing Company with president George T. Delacorte Jr., and was hired as an assistant editor of three lowbrow magazines. When the United States entered World War II, Swanberg was 34 years old, father of two children, and suffering from a hearing disability. Rejected by the U.S. Army, in 1943 he enlisted in the Office of War Information and, after training, was sent to England following D-Day. In London, amid the V-1 and V-2 attacks, he prepared and edited pamphlets to be air-dropped behind enemy lines in France and later in Norway. With the end of the war he returned in October 1945 to Dell and the publishing world. Swanberg did not return to magazine editing but instead did freelance work within and without Dell. By 1953, he began carving out time for researching his first book (Sickles), which Scribner's purchased, beginning a long association. By the 1950s he had established himself as a biographer. Henry Robinson Luce (April 3, 1898 February 28, 1967), an American magazine magnate, was called "the most influential private citizen in the America of his day". He launched and closely supervised a stable of magazines that transformed journalism and the reading habits of upscale Americans. Time summarized and interpreted the week's news; Life was a picture magazine of politics, culture and society that dominated American visual perceptions in the era before television; Fortune explored in depth the economy and the world of business, introducing to executives avant-garde ideas such as Keynesianism; and Sports Illustrated which probed beneath the surface of the game to explore the motivations and strategies of the teams and key players. Add in his radio projects and newsreels, and Luce created the first multimedia corporation. Luce envisaged that the United States would achieve world hegemony, and in 1941 he declared the 20th century would be the "American Century'. It is impossible not to feel Luce's influence on his biographer W. A. Swanberg, whose concise writing holds the attention. With Swanberg's clean-swept prose, there's not a dull sentence to be found.