Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T06:22:20.710Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Author as a Brand Name: American Literary Figures and the Time Cover Story

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Joe Moran
Joe Moran
Affiliation:
Joe Moran is a doctoral student in American Studies at the University of Sussex, Brighton BNI 9QN, England. A version of this essay won the first BAAS Essay Prize, open to postgraduate students.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When Time magazine profiled him in March 1964, John Cheever wrote an entry in his journal which imagined his daughter Susan's thoughts:

After they put Daddy's picture on the cover of Time, he seemed to lose something… I don't mean like Dorian Gray or anything but like a savage who thinks that if he is photographed he will have lost part of his image. A man came up to the house … and painted a picture of Daddy. It was painted in a definite style, a magazine cover style, and Daddy seemed to get himself mixed up with all the kings and presidents and so forth who had been on the cover before him. I mean he seemed in some way locked into the cover, fixed there, impressed on the paper. Once I lost my temper at him and said I don't think anybody's impressed by the fact that you had your face on Time magazine … They have all kinds of people; broken down ball players and crooks. It hurt his feelings, you could see.

Cheever's words give some suggestion both of the importance authors attached to the Time cover story, which at the peak of the magazine's influence was widely perceived as the apotheosis of American fame, and of their confusion over what it actually signified. This essay aims to explore this ambivalence by investigating the ways in which Time featured novelists, poets and playwrights as the subjects of its cover stories in the period from the magazine's first issue in 1923 to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it began to lose some of its status as “the National Poet Laureate.” Time owed this status to its position as champion of the “middlebrow,” being designed “for the lady from Dubuque … and for the President of the United States” and combining commercial success with semi-institutional legitimacy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , December 1995 , pp. 349 - 363
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Cheever, Susan, Home Before Dark (London: Picador, 1986), 154Google Scholar.

2 Coover, Robert's term in The Public Burning (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), 319Google Scholar.

3 Luce, Henry's words, quoted in Kobler, John, Luce: His Time, Life and Fortune (London: MacDonald, 1968), 46Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, Phillips, McCandlish, “Book Promotion: Success Isn't Sure,” New York Times, 31 12 1971, 8Google Scholar, and Coser, Lewis A., Kadushin, Charles and Powell, Walter W., Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 202–4Google Scholar.

5 Blotner, Joseph (ed.), Selected Letters of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1977), 366Google Scholar.

6 Manso, Peter, Mailer: His Life and Times (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1985), 546Google Scholar.

7 See, for example, the account of the publicity surrounding Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in Smith, William D., “A Success Money Didn't Buy: Capote's New Book Bestseller Before It Was Written,” New York Times, 20 02 1966, III. 16Google Scholar.

8 Swanberg, W. A., Luce and His Empire (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1972), 181Google Scholar.

9 “An Obliging Man,” Time, 61, 2 (12 01 1953), 44Google Scholar.

10 “Private Historian,” Time, 28, 6 (10 07 1936), 53Google Scholar.

11 Stuart, and Ewen, Elizabeth, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 41–77 passimGoogle Scholar.

12 Susman, Warren I., Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), xxivGoogle Scholar.

13 , Swanberg, Luce and His Empire, 454–55Google Scholar.

14 Gray, Paul, “Art and Its Rewards: Some Creators Who Made News That Stayed News,” Time 60th Anniversary Issue, 122, 15 (5 10 1983), 119Google Scholar.

15 Kanfer, Stefan, “Two Myths Converge: NM discovers MM,” Time, 102, 3 (16 07 1973), 60Google Scholar.

16 Raeburn, John, Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 98Google Scholar.

17 Ibid., 68.

18 Time, 33, 4 (23 01 1939)Google Scholar.

19 “Ovid in Ossining,” Time, 83, 13 (27 03 1964), 52Google Scholar.

20 Ibid., 52, 54.

21 Ibid., 52, 57.

22 “A View from the Catacombs,” Time, 91, 17 (26 04 1968), 66Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., 75.

24 A childhood sweetheart is referred to as “the closest Williams came to marriage, though certain actresses have since had crushes on him.” “The Angel of the Odd,” Time, 79, 10 (9 03 1962), 46Google Scholar. Baldwin is described as “effeminate in manner.” “Races: Freedom — Now,” Time, 81, 20 (17 05 1963), 26Google Scholar.

25 Maltby, Richard, Dreams for Sale: Popular Culture in the 20th Century (London: Harrap, 1989), 59Google Scholar.

26 “No up-to-date housewife wants to fall behind the daily procession. She urgently uses the sure help of TIME… [which] carries the colorful narrative of each week's events.” Time, 8, 14 (4 10 1926), 41Google Scholar.

27 “Ovid in Ossining,” 52.

28 “Spruce Street Boy,” Time, 53, 10 (7 03 1949), 46Google Scholar.

29 “A Letter from the Publisher,” Time, 135, 24 (11 06 1990), 4Google Scholar.

30 “Night Thoughts,” Time, 33, 19 (8 05 1939), 78Google Scholar.

31 “Ulysses Lands,” Time, 23, 5 (29 01 1934), 49Google Scholar.

32 “The Second Chance,” Time, 89, 22 (2 06 1967), 67Google Scholar.

33 “The Hermit of Lambertville,” Time, 70, 10 (2 09 1957), 72Google Scholar.

34 “I will protest to the last: no photographs, no recorded documents. It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books.” Blotner, , Selected Letters, 285Google Scholar.

35 Faulkner, William, “On Privacy (The American Dream: What Happened to It?)”, in Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, ed. Meriwether, James B. (New York: Random House, 1965), 62–75Google Scholar.

36 Hamilton, Ian, In Search of J. D. Salinger (London: Heinemann, 1988), 172–6Google Scholar.

37 Boorstin, Daniel J., The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961), 57Google Scholar.

38 Lowenthal, Leo, “The Triumph of Mass Idols,” in Literature, Popular Culture and Society (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1968), 115Google Scholar.

39 Cheever, Benjamin (ed.), The Letters of John Cheever (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989), 238Google Scholar.

40 Swanberg, , Luce and His Empire, 455Google Scholar.

41 “Salinger says with coy fraudulence that ‘I live in Westport with my dog.’ The dark facts are that he has not lived in Westport or had a dog for years.” “Sonny: An Introduction,” Time, 78, 11 (15 09 1961), 63Google Scholar.

42 Schickel, Richard, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1985), 55Google Scholar.

43 “All Stories End …,” Time, 30, 16 (18 10 1937), 80–1Google Scholar, and “An American Storyteller,” Time 64, 24 (13 12 1954), 42–3Google Scholar.

44 Sontag, Susan, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 4Google Scholar.

45 Schickel, , Intimate Strangers, 56Google Scholar.

46 Cheever, John, The Journals (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), ixGoogle Scholar.

47 Suplee, Curt, “Women, God, Sorrow and John Updike,” The Washington Post, 27 09 1979, F9Google Scholar.

48 Fowler, Doreen and Abadie, Ann J. (eds.), Faulkner and Popular Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 24Google Scholar.

49 “The Second Chance,” 68.

50 “A Letter from the Publisher,” Time, 89, 22 (2 06 1967), 9Google Scholar.

51 Ibid., 9.

52 Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 13Google Scholar.

53 Ibid., 17.

54 Ibid., 27.

55 Manso, , Mailer, 548Google Scholar.

56 Smith, James Steel, “Life Looks at Literature,” in Davison, Peter, Meyersohn, Rolf and Shils, Edward (eds.), Literary Taste, Culture and Mass Communication, Volume 12: Bookselling, Reviewing and Reading (Cambridge, Mass.: Chadwyck-Healey, 1978), 57Google Scholar

57 “Bible Boar,” Time 9, 11 (14 03 1927), 38Google Scholar.

58 “Laureate of the Booboisie,” Time, 46, 15 (8 10 1945), 100Google Scholar.

59 “View from the Catacombs,” 62.

60 “A Letter from the Publisher,” Time, 91, 20 (17 05 1963), 21Google Scholar.

61 Kobler, , Luce, 4Google Scholar.

62 “Races — Freedom Now,” 25.

63 McLuhan, Marshall, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 10Google Scholar.

64 Greenburg, Dan and Ransom, James, “A Snob's Guide to Status Magazines,” in Hammel, William (ed.), The Popular Arts in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2nd ed. 1977), 463Google Scholar.

65 Grunwald, Henry, “Time at 60: A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief,” Time 60th Anniversary Issue, 122, 15 (5 10 1983), 7Google Scholar.

66 Vivian, John, The Media of Mass Communication (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991), xviGoogle Scholar.

67 Gray, Paul, “Burden of Success,” Time, 135, 24 (11 06 1990), 68–72Google Scholar.

68 Curran, James and Gurevitch, Michael (eds.), Mass Media and Society (London: Edward Arnold, 1991), 173–4Google Scholar.

69 “A Letter from the Publisher,” Time, 135, 24 (11 06 1990), 4Google Scholar.

70 Schiller, Herbert I., Mass Communications and American Empire (Boulder: Westview Press, 2nd ed. 1992), 2Google Scholar.

71 Schiller, , Mass Communications, 14Google Scholar.

72 Fishwick, Marshall W., Seven Pillars of Popular Culture (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 120Google Scholar.