| This project considers intellectuals who worked for Time, Fortune , and Life magazines between 1923 and 1965. It places their experiences in the context of the growth of mass culture and the persistent debates over the place of intellectuals in American society. Discussed in detail are James Agee, Daniel Bell, Whittaker Chambers, Russell Davenport, Walker Evans, John Hersey, Dwight Macdonald, Archibald MacLeish, T. S. Matthews, Theodore White, and William H. Whyte, Jr. Valuing their independence, yet pushed by financial necessity and pulled by the appeal of a large audience, many mid-century intellectuals worked for mass-circulation magazines. Henry Luce founded Time (1923), Fortune (1930) and Life (1936) as both business enterprises and as part of an educational mission to bolster middle-class citizenship and business leadership. Intellectuals joined in this project almost from the beginning, motivated by their own concerns, but initially sharing many of Luce's goals and assumptions. In the 1930s they developed a new type of journalism at Fortune, blending factual journalism with poetic technique in an attempt to convey the reality of the Depression more effectively. In the 1940s, intellectuals fought an internal struggle at Time concerning how the end of the war would be reported and what room Time held for varied viewpoints. By the 1950s, with a cold war consensus drastically restricting the possibilities at Time, intellectuals again published important work in Fortune, challenging the prevailing tenets of the corporate liberal consensus. This project charts the varied motivations and diverse fates of intellectuals at Time Inc., considering the relationship between their experiences on the magazines and the work they published independently. Contrary to the pervasive view that labeled writing for mass circulation magazines "selling out," this dissertation finds intellectuals had a diverse array of experiences working at Time Inc. While some struggled to find a voice, others functioned as interstitial intellectuals, creating and defending spaces of relative autonomy within Time's institutional environment. For intellectuals who defined themselves as in, but not of, the organization, institutional employment provoked some of their richest work. |
