The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

In early February 1922, Henry Luce and his friend and rival, Briton Hadden, negotiated seven weeks’ leave from their jobs as reporters for the Baltimore News. The recent Yale graduates (Class of 1920) had been working at the newspaper only a few months, yet already they had their eyes on a bigger prize. In stolen moments from their day jobs, they had been hitting up established Yale alumni—many of them the parents of rich classmates—to invest in a scheme that Luce characterized as “the gamble of our lives…the crazy, half-romantic thing that has ruined thousands before us.” … Back to Article