Life (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Life magazine arrived on newsstands on the 23rd of November, 1936, and within four months it was selling more than one million copies a week. Henry Luce had purchased the name from an 1883 humour magazine for $92,000, not because he wanted the humour, but because he wanted the word. He had a vision: that pictures, not prose, could carry the weight of the news. That a single photograph could do what thousands of words could not. What followed was one of the most consequential publishing experiments in American history. How did a dime-priced magazine become a window onto the world for a quarter of the U.S. population? What made it stumble, disappear, and return again and again? And who were the photographers, editors, and subjects who made it matter?

• 2. A Dime and a Vision

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  The first issue of the new Life sold for ten cents and opened with five pages of photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt. The cover showed the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, a Works Progress Administration project, shot by Margaret Bourke-White. Luce had circulated a confidential prospectus inside Time Inc. earlier that year, and its language was almost poetic. He described a magazine that would let readers see life, see the world, eyewitness great events, watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud. The format reflected that ambition. Text was condensed into captions for 50 pages of photographs, printed on heavily coated paper.

  The magazine had been the third publication Luce launched, after Time in 1923 and Fortune in 1930. Founding editors John Shaw Billings and Daniel Longwell helped shape its character from the start. Longwell would later serve as managing editor through 1946 and as chairman of the board of editors until his retirement in 1954. He was credited with publishing Winston Churchill's The Second World War and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in the magazine's pages.

  Circulation leapt from 380,000 copies of the first issue to over one million a week within four months, well beyond what the company had predicted. That growth threatened The Saturday Evening Post, then the largest-circulation weekly in the country. A competitor called Look launched a year later in 1937, running until 1971 in Life's wake. Luce moved the operation into its own building at 19 West 31st Street, a Beaux-Arts structure built in 1894, before the editorial offices later shifted to 9 Rockefeller Plaza.

• 3. War and the Lens

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  When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Life was positioned as almost uniquely equipped to cover it. By 1944, seven of the 40 Time and Life war correspondents were women, among them Margaret Bourke-White, Mary Welsh Hemingway, Lael Tucker, Peggy Durdin, Shelley Smith Mydans, Annalee Jacoby, and Jacqueline Saix. A publisher's letter from the 8th of May, 1944 listed Saix and Welsh as the only women officially named as part of the magazine's team.

  In July 1942, the magazine launched its first art contest for soldiers, drawing more than 1,500 entries from all ranks. Judges awarded $1,000 in prizes and selected 16 works for reproduction. The National Gallery in Washington, D.C. agreed to exhibit 117 entries that summer. When Congress prohibited the armed forces from spending government funds on artists in the field, Life stepped in, privately hiring artists being let go by the Department of War. On the 7th of December, 1960, Life managers donated many of those works to the Army's art programs.

  In July 1943, the magazine hired Robert Capa to cover the Sicilian and Italian campaigns. Capa accompanied the first wave of the D-Day invasion on the 6th of June, 1944, and came back with only a handful of images, many out of focus. The captions stated his hands were shaking. Capa disputed this, saying a darkroom error had ruined his negatives. He later titled his war memoir Slightly Out of Focus, published in 1947. Capa was killed on the 6th of May, 1954, after stepping on a landmine while covering the First Indochina War. Photographer Bob Landry also went in with the first wave at D-Day, but all of his film was lost.

• 4. Controversy and Consequence

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  In August 1942, Life published a report on racial and labor unrest in Detroit, warning that the city's morale situation was "perhaps the worst in the U.S." and that Detroit could either defeat the enemy abroad or blow up at home. Mayor Edward Jeffries called the piece scurrilous and labeled it a yellow magazine. The article was censored from all copies sold outside North America, considered too dangerous for the war effort.

  On the 1st of November, 1948, the day before the U.S. presidential election, Life ran a full-page photograph of candidate Thomas E. Dewey and his wife aboard a ferry in San Francisco Bay, with the caption identifying Dewey as the next president. Harry S. Truman won. Life had made the same confident misjudgment as the Chicago Tribune's famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline.

  On the 10th of May, 1950, the council of ministers in Cairo banned Life from Egypt permanently. All copies on sale were confiscated. No official reason was given, though Egyptian officials expressed anger over a story published on the 10th of April that same year about King Farouk of Egypt, described as the "Problem King."

  In 1957, R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president at J. P. Morgan, published an article in Life praising the effects of magic mushrooms, drawing on rituals he had witnessed in Mexico. The piece prompted Albert Hofmann to isolate psilocybin in 1958, and it drew Timothy Leary to Mexico to try the mushrooms himself. Life's cover story on LSD, published on the 25th of March, 1966, reached mass audiences at a moment when the drug had not yet been criminalized.

• 5. Voices That Defined the Era

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  Edward K. Thompson arrived at Life as a Time stringer in 1937, hired as assistant picture editor. By 1949 he was managing editor, a post he held until 1961, before serving as editor-in-chief for nearly a decade until his retirement in 1970. He was known for the latitude he extended to his editors, particularly what he called a trio of formidable and colorful women: Sally Kirkland, fashion editor; Mary Letherbee, movie editor; and Mary Hamman, modern living editor.

  In November 1954, actress Dorothy Dandridge became the first African-American woman to appear on the magazine's cover. Gordon Parks was shooting for Life in the 1960s. In 2000 he recalled his purpose: "The camera is my weapon against the things I dislike about the universe and how I show the beautiful things about the universe." He added: "I didn't care about Life magazine. I cared about the people."

  Paul Welch's article "Homosexuality in America," published in June 1964, was the first time a mainstream national publication in the United States reported on gay issues. The photographer was referred to the Tool Box, a gay leather bar in San Francisco, by Hal Call. The bar's mural of life-size leathermen, painted by Chuck Arnett in 1962, opened the piece across two pages. The article described San Francisco as "The Gay Capital of America" and was credited with drawing many gay leathermen to the city.

  In the 1950s, Ernest Hemingway became closely linked to the magazine. After Life published The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, editors contracted Hemingway for a piece on bullfighting. He attended a series of contests between two top matadors in 1959 and delivered a 10,000-word article when 4,000 had been requested. That piece was republished in 1985 as the novella The Dangerous Summer.

• 6. The Long Decline

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  Television eroded Life's audience through the late 1950s. In May 1959 the magazine cut its newsstand price from 25 cents to 20 cents, an acknowledgment of the pressure. By the early 1960s, the editorial mix had shifted toward color photographs of movie stars and the Kennedy family, Vietnam, and the Apollo program, but circulation kept slipping.

  In January 1971, Time Inc. announced it would reduce circulation from 8.5 million to 7 million to offset shrinking advertising revenue. By the following year, the magazine cut to 5.5 million beginning with its issue from the 14th of January, 1972. Industry data showed that 96% of Life's circulation was mail subscriptions, with only 4% from the more profitable newsstand sales. The magazine then damaged its credibility by supporting Clifford Irving's fraudulent autobiography of Howard Hughes, purchasing serialization rights to a manuscript that was exposed as a hoax in January 1972.

  Publisher Gary Valk announced on the 8th of December, 1972 that the magazine would cease publication by year's end and lay off hundreds of staff. The final issue of the weekly Life appeared on the 29th of December, 1972. Between 1972 and 1978, Time Inc. published ten Life Special Reports on themes such as "The Spirit of Israel" and "The Year in Pictures," selling between 500,000 and 1 million copies each at cover prices of up to $2.

  Life returned as a monthly in October 1978, holding a circulation of around 1.5 million through the 1980s. In 1986 it marked its 50th anniversary with a special issue reproducing every cover since 1936. By February 1993 it announced a shift to a smaller format, reducing its advertising prices by 34% to attract buyers, and cutting its circulation guarantee for advertisers from 1.7 million to 1.5 million copies.

• 7. Endings and Returns

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  In March 2000, Time Inc. chairman Don Logan told CNN.com that the monthly Life was being closed despite still being profitable, because maintaining its circulation of approximately 1.5 million had grown too costly. "It was still in the black," he said, but the magazine had always struggled to find its identity in its reincarnated form.

  The final issue carried a story that became its own kind of epitaph. The magazine's very first issue in 1936 had featured a baby named George Story with the headline "Life Begins." The magazine had returned to Story over the decades, tracking his marriage, children, and career as a journalist. After the closure was announced in March 2000, Story died of heart failure on the 4th of April, 2000. The last issue was titled "A Life Ends."

  In October 2004, Life launched a third time as a free weekly newspaper supplement distributed with more than 60 papers, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, with a combined circulation of approximately 12 million. That version ran until the 20th of April 2007. On the 18th of November, 2008, Google began hosting an archive of over six million Life photographs, many never published, accessible through Google image search and the Google Cultural Institute.

  Special editions followed notable occasions: a Bob Dylan issue tied to his Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, a Paul McCartney issue when he turned 75 in 2017. In 2024, a two-volume photo book titled LIFE. Hollywood, published by Taschen, drew on the magazine's archive from 1936 to 1972. That same year, Bedford Media, owned by Karlie Kloss and Joshua Kushner, announced plans to revive the magazine in an agreement with its current owner, Dotdash Meredith.