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Purpose and benefits

Henry Robinson Luce’s strict Presbyterian upbringing at a missionary station in China seemed to do him no harm. His early academic record was outstanding, and his performance at Yale University no less impressive. When he graduated in 1920—voted ‘most brilliant’ student of the year by his peers—he had already shown a talent for editing by radically overhauling the Yale newspaper, the "Daily News". Following a whistle-stop tour of Europe, he worked on the "Chicago Daily News" and then the "Baltimore News", where he linked up with fellow Yale alumnus Briton Hadden. Together they were unstoppable, launching a new publication "Time, the Weekly News Magazine" in March 1923 and nursing it from a paltry circulation to one of 118,000 in its third year. In 1929 they followed this success with the launch of the business magazine "Fortune" to chronicle the ups and downs of the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Great Depression. Taking sole control after the untimely death of Hadden in 1929, Luce went on to publish one successful magazine after another. "Life" magazine, founded in 1936, broke the company’s circulation records, and they were broken again by "Sports Illustrated" launched in 1954. After threatening to retire for many years, Luce died of a heart attack in 1967, still at the helm of his empire.