Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and Dewitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader's Digest - Hardcover

Heidenry, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393034666 ISBN 13: 9780393034660

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1993

Synopsis

Looks at the founding and growth of the hugely successful magazine and its role as an exporter of popular American culture

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

A lengthy, albeit consistently engrossing, take on the Reader's Digest and how it became one of the worlds's most influential periodicals. Drawing on a wealth of sources, Heidenry offers a well-rounded account of how Roy DeWitt Wallace (``Wally'' to intimates) built a farflung communications empire on an idea revived while he recovered from wounds suffered in WW I. Back in the States, the thirtysomething Wally came up with enough money to publish the first edition of Reader's Digest in February 1922. The monthly's format and content, almost immediate hits with middle America, have changed little since then. From its original venue in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, however, RD moved to Pleasantville, an N.Y.C. exurb. In later life, Wally, who had deliberately overstated the editorial role played by his wife, Lila Acheson, to enhance the fledgling journal's drawing power with women, downplayed her apparently negligible contributions. Whoever was responsible, the magazine proved to have mass appeal outside the US, and more than a dozen foreign editions were successfully launched. Though a frequent object of the literary establishment's scorn, RD prospered in good times and bad as the proprietors (who lured name writers with top pay) developed a flair for direct-mail promotion and a willingness to break with tradition, e.g., by opening their pages to advertisers in the mid-50's. RD has survived the death of its founders (both of whom lived into their 90s) in good style, remaining the keystone of a profitable media enterprise with new worlds to conquer in Eastern Europe and beyond. If Heidenry doesn't always endorse the odd amalgam of political conservatism, religious uplift, and double-entendre humor that has made Reader's Digest a perdurable institution, he offers an evenhanded appreciation of its socioeconomic attractions, as well as generally admiring but unsparing portraits of the principals and their key subordinates. As complete a wrap-up, then, as general readers could want on a commercial/cultural phenomenon. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Heidenry offers an engaging, sweeping history of the Reader's Digest publishing empire and the couple who founded it.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0393034666
• ISBN 13: 9780393034660
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 701