The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine - Hardcover

Wilner, Isaiah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060505494 ISBN 13: 9780060505493

Publisher: Harper, 2006

Synopsis

Here is the tale of The Man Time Forgot: the story of Briton Hadden, the genius behind Time magazine, and his betrayal by Henry R. Luce. The true story of their tortured friendship has never before been told.

Friends, collaborators, and childhood rivals, Hadden and Luce are not yet twenty-five when they start the nation's first newsmagazine at the outset of the Roaring Twenties. Millionaires at thirty, together they lay the foundation for a media empire. But their partnership is explosive and their rivalry ferocious, inspired by envy as well as love. When Hadden dies at the age of thirty-one, Luce begins to bury the legacy of the giant he was never able to best.

In this groundbreaking biography, Isaiah Wilner offers the first full account of the birth of Time. He paints a fascinating portrait of a man whose mind dreams of everything, from the weekly newsmagazine to Life, Sports Illustrated, and the radio quiz show, and he presents a major reappraisal of the most significant media figure of the twentieth century.

The story travels from the tomb of Yale's storied secret society, Skull and Bones, to high-society Europe and South America, following the friendship of two brilliant and opposite souls who inspire one another to the pinnacle of earthly success. The young men emerge from the crucible of the Great War with an idea—Hadden's idea—that shapes the way Americans will think about the world. By making the news accessible, and amusing readers as it informs them, Hadden's Time sets the course for modern journalism into the twenty-first century.

Isaiah Wilner brings to life this remarkable story in The Man Time Forgot, a book as stylish, passionate, and provocative as Briton Hadden himself.

About this title

About the Author

Isaiah Wilner is a writer for New York magazine. He attended Yale University and was editor in chief of the Yale Daily News. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From the Back Cover

Here is the tale of The Man Time Forgot: the story of Briton Hadden, the genius behind Time magazine, and his betrayal by Henry R. Luce. The true story of their tortured friendship has never before been told.

Friends, collaborators, and childhood rivals, Hadden and Luce are not yet twenty-five when they start the nation's first newsmagazine at the outset of the Roaring Twenties. Millionaires at thirty, together they lay the foundation for a media empire. But their partnership is explosive and their rivalry ferocious, inspired by envy as well as love. When Hadden dies at the age of thirty-one, Luce begins to bury the legacy of the giant he was never able to best.

In this groundbreaking biography, Isaiah Wilner offers the first full account of the birth of Time. He paints a fascinating portrait of a man whose mind dreams of everything, from the weekly newsmagazine to Life, Sports Illustrated, and the radio quiz show, and he presents a major reappraisal of the most significant media figure of the twentieth century.

The story travels from the tomb of Yale's storied secret society, Skull and Bones, to high-society Europe and South America, following the friendship of two brilliant and opposite souls who inspire one another to the pinnacle of earthly success. The young men emerge from the crucible of the Great War with an idea—Hadden's idea—that shapes the way Americans will think about the world. By making the news accessible, and amusing readers as it informs them, Hadden's Time sets the course for modern journalism into the twenty-first century.

Isaiah Wilner brings to life this remarkable story in The Man Time Forgot, a book as stylish, passionate, and provocative as Briton Hadden himself.

Reviews

Many who think of Time as a staid pillar of establishment journalism will be surprised to learn that, at its birth in the 1920s, it was an edgy, controversial upstart. Journalist Wilner revisits its development through this scintillating biography of Time's founding editor, Briton Hadden, a Promethean figure whose contributions were, the author suggests, erased from the corporate history after his early death in 1929 by jealous cofounder Henry Luce. Hadden, Wilner contends, came up with the then novel idea of the "news-magazine," a national publication presenting the news (largely cribbed from the New York Times) in a highly organized, easily digestible format for America's busy middle classes. He was also the originator of "Timestyle" journalism—news as a pageant of outsized personalities, punchy narratives, colorful details, Homeric cadences and sly, urbane drolleries, where "heroes and villains strode through the world, raising voices, slamming fists, firing guns"—which readers found enthralling and critics shallow and misleading. In Wilner's telling, Hadden himself is a Fitzgerald character: a hard-drinking, perpetually carousing Jazz Age icon, his outward ebullience masking an inward despondency. The result is a perceptive psychological study and cultural history, with a touch of ink-stained romanticism. Photos. (Oct.)
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When Briton Hadden died, in 1929, at the age of thirty-one, he had earned a million dollars, invented the radio quiz show, coined the terms "socialite" and "pundit," and seismically changed American journalism by conceiving of the weekly news magazine Time. He also left behind extensive notes about magazines that became Life and Sports Illustrated. While Henry Luce is the name most closely associated with the Time empire, this illuminating biography reveals that Hadden was the "presiding genius" at the fledgling publication. Friends and rivals first at Hotchkiss and then at Yale, Hadden and Luce were close and competitive, though Hadden always came out ahead during his lifetime. Wilner makes a convincing case that, after Hadden's death, Luce assiduously downplayed his colleague's essential role in founding and shaping one of the most successful magazines in history.
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Although Henry Luce is celebrated as the founder of Time magazine, it was actually the brainchild of another man, Briton Hadden, who has been deliberately written out of the magazine's history, according to Wilner. Luce and Hadden met at Hotchkiss prep school, where, as editors of the newspaper, they began a rivalry of competitive ideas on news delivery that continued when they both went to Yale, sparking a lifetime of tension over competition and collaboration. When they were 25, they joined up to realize Hadden's dream, a magazine that condensed the national news of the day in a readable style. Hadden, from a wealthy family, was outgoing and audacious. Luce, from a family of missionaries, was brilliant but circumspect. Luce could never come out of Hadden's shadow. When his more celebrated partner died at 31, Luce immediately began to erase Hadden's legacy. With access to the Time archives and unpublished interviews and correspondence, Wilner offers all the excitement of a new media enterprise launched in the Roaring Twenties by two fascinating figures. Vanessa Bush
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In January of 1929, the creator of Time magazine lay dying in a Brooklyn hospital bed. He was thirty years old. Briton Hadden did not look like a man with only a few weeks to live. His family had decided not to tell him of his dire condition. But the doctors believed he stood almost no chance. Hadden, who had only just begun the creative revolution that would transform journalism in the subsequent century, had drunk and partied his way to his deathbed....

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060505494
• ISBN 13: 9780060505493
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352