The Man Time Forgot

August 14, 2006
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.