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The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine
Here is the tale of The Man Time Forgot: the story of Briton Hadden, the genius behind Time magazine, and his betrayal by Henry R. Luce. The true story of their tortured friendship has never before been told.
Friends, collaborators, and childhood rivals, Hadden and Luce are not yet twenty-five when they start the nation's first newsmagazine at the outset of the Roaring Twenties. Millionaires at thirty, together they lay the foundation for a media empire. But their partnership is explosive and their rivalry ferocious, inspired by envy as well as love. When Hadden dies at the age of thirty-one, Luce begins to bury the legacy of the giant he was never able to best.
In this groundbreaking biography, Isaiah Wilner offers the first full account of the birth of Time. He paints a fascinating portrait of a man whose mind dreams of everything, from the weekly newsmagazine to Life, Sports Illustrated, and the radio quiz show, and he presents a major reappraisal of the most significant media figure of the twentieth century.
The story travels from the tomb of Yale's storied secret society, Skull and Bones, to high-society Europe and South America, following the friendship of two brilliant and opposite souls who inspire one another to the pinnacle of earthly success. The young men emerge from the crucible of the Great War with an idea—Hadden's idea—that shapes the way Americans will think about the world. By making the news accessible, and amusing readers as it informs them, Hadden's Time sets the course for modern journalism into the twenty-first century.
Isaiah Wilner brings to life this remarkable story in The Man Time Forgot, a book as stylish, passionate, and provocative as Briton Hadden himself.
Friends, collaborators, and childhood rivals, Hadden and Luce are not yet twenty-five when they start the nation's first newsmagazine at the outset of the Roaring Twenties. Millionaires at thirty, together they lay the foundation for a media empire. But their partnership is explosive and their rivalry ferocious, inspired by envy as well as love. When Hadden dies at the age of thirty-one, Luce begins to bury the legacy of the giant he was never able to best.
In this groundbreaking biography, Isaiah Wilner offers the first full account of the birth of Time. He paints a fascinating portrait of a man whose mind dreams of everything, from the weekly newsmagazine to Life, Sports Illustrated, and the radio quiz show, and he presents a major reappraisal of the most significant media figure of the twentieth century.
The story travels from the tomb of Yale's storied secret society, Skull and Bones, to high-society Europe and South America, following the friendship of two brilliant and opposite souls who inspire one another to the pinnacle of earthly success. The young men emerge from the crucible of the Great War with an idea—Hadden's idea—that shapes the way Americans will think about the world. By making the news accessible, and amusing readers as it informs them, Hadden's Time sets the course for modern journalism into the twenty-first century.
Isaiah Wilner brings to life this remarkable story in The Man Time Forgot, a book as stylish, passionate, and provocative as Briton Hadden himself.
342 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 28, 2012
"They were all under thirty with no idea of what they had yet to learn. To hell with it--they simply scrawled, smoking cigarettes, chewing gum, guffawing when they got in a a good line. They wore British tweeds to the office; the smart dressers wore derbies and carried canes. Their style of dress revealed their attitude toward reporting. In those clothes, they would never go muckraking in the streets. They viewed themselves as storytellers, not hunting down the facts but culling and arranging them, shaping the narrative, painting the big picture."
I've occasionally heard it said that you know a story has played out when you read it in Time magazine. There are, I suppose, two ways of interpreting that: (1) Time is slow, always the last to the table when news breaks; (2) Time is magisterial, always offering the last word on a subject. I don't know about the magisterial side, but whatever Time is, it isn't slow--at least if you take into consideration the manic, caffeinated editorial process described in Isaiah Wilner's The Man Time Forgot. The freneticism that went into each issue of the fledgling magazine in the 1920s is exhausting to read unless you have the metabolism and ambition of a Jazz-Age post-graduate. Hours on end, line-editing against a ticking clock to a cacophonous soundtrack of linotype and agitation, subsisting on coffee and bootleg liquor and egg sandwiches, every week Briton Hadden, Henry Luce and their team of writers, editors and "boys" and "girls" would re-present the news. The Man Time Forgot makes the provocative (and probably largely accurate) claim that this whole thing was Hadden's idea, that Luce was an early adopter and shrewd interloper, and that Time's corporate history is marred by a profound lack of appreciation and a pathetic will to power.
History hardly seems so simple, but such is the nature of Time's editorial approach, at least in the early days. Hadden's main innovation was the notion that news had become arcane, the province of only the already-informed; as a result journalism had not only betrayed its responsibility to the whole citizenry but also lost its luster. Time took the news of the week and refashioned it into epic storytelling--spartan in detail but lush with imagery, determining what one needed to know but making every detail memorable. News changed irrevocably in the aftermath of "Timestyle," what we now know as simply "style." What McDonald's was to food, Time was to news.
Perhaps that's too harsh. That's not Wilner's point in this book, in any case, but I found myself questioning the greatness of the enterprise throughout the book. Wilner himself writes in Timestyle, crafting an occasionally purplish prose and indulging the Great Man theory that makes reporting like Time's possible.
It was important for Hadden and Luce to follow the rules of the epic in how they conveyed the news. There were heroes of fixed chin and furrowed brow; there were villains of nefarious stare and wicked grin. There were bilious buffoons and fair-eyed femme fatales. The players were the thing wherein you got the gist of the story. Hadden had this idea from childhood, ostensibly, and it took fuller shape during his time at Yale, where he befriended and ultimately conspired with Luce, the lesser light, to change the way people learned what they needed to know. Luce, the son of missionaries and a light-footed,vexing aristocrat, found himself always in the shadows, nipping at the heels and riding the coattails of the expansive, burly and larger-than-life Hadden, friend to all but servant to none. It's obvious, given the pictures Wilner paints of each of these figures, who is this epic's hero and who is its villain. If you will pardon the reference to a recent pop-culture phenomenon, Hadden is Thor, and Luce is Loki.
As I said, history hardly seems so simple, and Wilner does offer the occasional nod to Luce's particular genius. Time under Hadden alone would have been a frat-boy anarchist's playful thumbing of the nose to his preferred industry, a subversive pet project that would not have survived long into Hadden's thirties (Hadden himself died at age thirty-one). It was Luce's more detached and methodical mind (as well as his Napoleonic ambition) that fueled the magazine's growth and ultimate cementing as a magazine of record. Thirty-five years later it was Luce who was able to gather in one room the Great Men and Women of American culture, honored over the decades under his editorial gaze as shapers of the century, all of whom were happy to in turn acknowledge the importance of Time as the archiver of history, the last word on every subject. But every epic needs a villain, in the mindset of Timestyle, and for Wilner Luce clearly fits the bill.
What I'm more intrigued by--and perhaps such a book has been written--is the unintended consequence of Timestyle on the American consciousness. The problem with diagnosing a chronic problem of societal ignorance is that it is sometimes hard to tell the poison from the cure. Time under Hadden's watch and successively under Luce accomplished a great thing by making a whole nation more aware of what was happening in the world, but it did so by reducing historical figures to their physical attributes and reducing conflicts from their inherent complexity to digestible levels of right and wrong. In the beginning, Time did no original reporting; it cut and pasted and aggregated and stole and plagiarized and rewrote with only passing concern for facticity. In the beginning, Time was not a sponsor of journalism but a referendum on the work of reporters around the country. Hadden wasn't a student of the Chicago Manual of Style so much as he was a disciple of the Iliad; he kept it at his desk and referred his writers to it regularly. This appeal to the epic unconsciously perpetuated the Cult of the Great Man, which ultimately contributed to our current cult of celebrity and feeds into the nagging suspicion among many that we are less informed today than ever. Long before Google made us stupid (Google it), it seems, the magisterial Time magazine was making us reductionists.
Perhaps that's too harsh an indictment. But the weaknesses I see in Time's original editorial vision, in Timestyle's editorial approach, is apparent in this book: a hagiographical treatment of the tragic-comic Thor/Hadden and a cynical send-up of the devious, swindling Loki/Luce. It's a good read for any editor, a cautionary tale of both the thirst for power and the shadow side of creativity, but I hope it's not the final word on Time's legacy.
I've occasionally heard it said that you know a story has played out when you read it in Time magazine. There are, I suppose, two ways of interpreting that: (1) Time is slow, always the last to the table when news breaks; (2) Time is magisterial, always offering the last word on a subject. I don't know about the magisterial side, but whatever Time is, it isn't slow--at least if you take into consideration the manic, caffeinated editorial process described in Isaiah Wilner's The Man Time Forgot. The freneticism that went into each issue of the fledgling magazine in the 1920s is exhausting to read unless you have the metabolism and ambition of a Jazz-Age post-graduate. Hours on end, line-editing against a ticking clock to a cacophonous soundtrack of linotype and agitation, subsisting on coffee and bootleg liquor and egg sandwiches, every week Briton Hadden, Henry Luce and their team of writers, editors and "boys" and "girls" would re-present the news. The Man Time Forgot makes the provocative (and probably largely accurate) claim that this whole thing was Hadden's idea, that Luce was an early adopter and shrewd interloper, and that Time's corporate history is marred by a profound lack of appreciation and a pathetic will to power.
History hardly seems so simple, but such is the nature of Time's editorial approach, at least in the early days. Hadden's main innovation was the notion that news had become arcane, the province of only the already-informed; as a result journalism had not only betrayed its responsibility to the whole citizenry but also lost its luster. Time took the news of the week and refashioned it into epic storytelling--spartan in detail but lush with imagery, determining what one needed to know but making every detail memorable. News changed irrevocably in the aftermath of "Timestyle," what we now know as simply "style." What McDonald's was to food, Time was to news.
Perhaps that's too harsh. That's not Wilner's point in this book, in any case, but I found myself questioning the greatness of the enterprise throughout the book. Wilner himself writes in Timestyle, crafting an occasionally purplish prose and indulging the Great Man theory that makes reporting like Time's possible.
It was important for Hadden and Luce to follow the rules of the epic in how they conveyed the news. There were heroes of fixed chin and furrowed brow; there were villains of nefarious stare and wicked grin. There were bilious buffoons and fair-eyed femme fatales. The players were the thing wherein you got the gist of the story. Hadden had this idea from childhood, ostensibly, and it took fuller shape during his time at Yale, where he befriended and ultimately conspired with Luce, the lesser light, to change the way people learned what they needed to know. Luce, the son of missionaries and a light-footed,vexing aristocrat, found himself always in the shadows, nipping at the heels and riding the coattails of the expansive, burly and larger-than-life Hadden, friend to all but servant to none. It's obvious, given the pictures Wilner paints of each of these figures, who is this epic's hero and who is its villain. If you will pardon the reference to a recent pop-culture phenomenon, Hadden is Thor, and Luce is Loki.
As I said, history hardly seems so simple, and Wilner does offer the occasional nod to Luce's particular genius. Time under Hadden alone would have been a frat-boy anarchist's playful thumbing of the nose to his preferred industry, a subversive pet project that would not have survived long into Hadden's thirties (Hadden himself died at age thirty-one). It was Luce's more detached and methodical mind (as well as his Napoleonic ambition) that fueled the magazine's growth and ultimate cementing as a magazine of record. Thirty-five years later it was Luce who was able to gather in one room the Great Men and Women of American culture, honored over the decades under his editorial gaze as shapers of the century, all of whom were happy to in turn acknowledge the importance of Time as the archiver of history, the last word on every subject. But every epic needs a villain, in the mindset of Timestyle, and for Wilner Luce clearly fits the bill.
What I'm more intrigued by--and perhaps such a book has been written--is the unintended consequence of Timestyle on the American consciousness. The problem with diagnosing a chronic problem of societal ignorance is that it is sometimes hard to tell the poison from the cure. Time under Hadden's watch and successively under Luce accomplished a great thing by making a whole nation more aware of what was happening in the world, but it did so by reducing historical figures to their physical attributes and reducing conflicts from their inherent complexity to digestible levels of right and wrong. In the beginning, Time did no original reporting; it cut and pasted and aggregated and stole and plagiarized and rewrote with only passing concern for facticity. In the beginning, Time was not a sponsor of journalism but a referendum on the work of reporters around the country. Hadden wasn't a student of the Chicago Manual of Style so much as he was a disciple of the Iliad; he kept it at his desk and referred his writers to it regularly. This appeal to the epic unconsciously perpetuated the Cult of the Great Man, which ultimately contributed to our current cult of celebrity and feeds into the nagging suspicion among many that we are less informed today than ever. Long before Google made us stupid (Google it), it seems, the magisterial Time magazine was making us reductionists.
Perhaps that's too harsh an indictment. But the weaknesses I see in Time's original editorial vision, in Timestyle's editorial approach, is apparent in this book: a hagiographical treatment of the tragic-comic Thor/Hadden and a cynical send-up of the devious, swindling Loki/Luce. It's a good read for any editor, a cautionary tale of both the thirst for power and the shadow side of creativity, but I hope it's not the final word on Time's legacy.
August 13, 2022
Briton Hadden was a most interesting human being.
March 25, 2010
Excellent first book by (Yale graduate) Isaiah Wilner with consensus of enjoyment and easy readability from members of our book club. Well documented and fascinating true story of the struggles and accomplishments of two Yale graduates (Briton Hadden & Henry Luce) in creating "Time" magazine. The book fully develops the personalities of the two protagonists, one from a wealthy background and one not, while chronicling their competitiveness and cooperation with each other as prep school classmates through college into the world of publishing. Especially pleasing is the concise flow of the story with events kept in date order without feeling at all like a history text. Although a bit of repetitiveness at times, it is kept in context and doesn't detract measurably from the story.
March 21, 2025
I loved learning about this segment (communications and reporting) of the 1920s — as well as the fascinating history of journalism and the rapid explosion of readership and magazines during the 1920s. The partnership of Luce and Hadden’s empire that was eventually built out of their innovative ideas was astonishing. There are so many surprising anecdotes. I knew that Time was a successful American magazine, but I had no idea how old it was and how very influential it was: they innovated the whole idea of aggregating news for a magazine, summarizing news radio reports, news quizzes to improve exposure and the Timestyle way of writing. The snappy modern way of expressing stories, and the news reminded me a lot of the other well known magazine of the era the New Yorker. In fact Brit Hadden and Harold Ross knew each other, and though they were opposites in background, they were both incredible innovators.
But the most amazing thing about this story is how the ego of Henry Luce successfully deconstructed Brit Hadden‘s being a cofounder and creative genius. By the time I finished reading this book, I realized that it was not a rumor that Luce had every intention of covering up Briton’s legacy as well as his will. The author offers plenty of specific evidence of how Luce covered up the founding partnership with Brit Hadden. The book is very interesting in general, and it gave me a lot of background about journalism. The author did a very thorough job and the New York Times review gave Isaiah Wilner good critique. I wish he’d write another book like this.
But the most amazing thing about this story is how the ego of Henry Luce successfully deconstructed Brit Hadden‘s being a cofounder and creative genius. By the time I finished reading this book, I realized that it was not a rumor that Luce had every intention of covering up Briton’s legacy as well as his will. The author offers plenty of specific evidence of how Luce covered up the founding partnership with Brit Hadden. The book is very interesting in general, and it gave me a lot of background about journalism. The author did a very thorough job and the New York Times review gave Isaiah Wilner good critique. I wish he’d write another book like this.
April 13, 2023
Entertaining read about the origins of one of the most influential magazines of the last century, and an interesting view of the media industry in the 1920s (same problems as today, different medium). Despite my typical aversion to the stories of privileged white men (Yalies to boot), I was interested as a former TIME employee and particularly enjoyed the last chapter where Wilner outlined Luce's repeated attempts to obscure Hadden's contributions. (Come for the details of the 40th anniversary gala, stay for the anecdote of Luce scratching out his own mention of Hadden from a TV interview transcript.)
August 5, 2024
So Henry Luce’s old schoolmate and journalistic partner, Briton Hadden, was the man really responsible for TIME’s style of journalism. An easy to read, novelistic biography. Hadden seems like a character from a screwball comedy, albeit one with a dark edge.
January 14, 2020
This was an interesting story but it needed some editing.
Read
April 22, 2015This quite readable story of one of the founders of Time Magazine proved more interesting than I expected. (Library discards from the book exchange are an uneven lot.) I grew up reading Time, and never really knew that much about its history despite having at times made good use of it and other widely read periodicals to research what Americans knew about at various times in the past. But as I seem to be (in part) becoming one of the scholars in the new-ish field of periodical studies, it stands to reason that I ought to be more familiar with the inner workings of Time.
This book is both a biography and a history of journalism. It tells the tale of the two men who founded Time--Briton Hadden and Henry Luce--and how after Hadden's early death Luce essentially blotted out public awareness of his friend's role. This is revelatory on a number of levels. Naturally one wants to learn about a forgotten pioneer and his ideas and rise to success, and one wants to know how this pair of friends and rivals invented the newsmagazine, but it is also a bit staggering that a man who was loved and admired in his own brilliantly successful lifetime could have been quite so rapidly pushed into obscurity. People who had known him didn't forget about him, but Luce promptly removed his name from the masthead and smothered attempts to memorialize him and generally give him his due. Luce obviously deeply resented the fact that Hadden had been the magazine's primary founder, but they built the magazine as a team.
There were things I would have liked to better understand--like Luce's tormented denial of Hadden's significance--but when I reached the end of the book and began looking through the sources, it became clear that the author probably got as close to these men as anyone born after their deaths possibly can (barring discovery of a trove of important new evidence). This is a well researched book that speaks well of its (first-time) author's ability to ferret out and digest masses of material and interviews. I also like the author's acknowledgement of the splendid cover design, which I appreciate increasingly the more times I look at it.
This book is both a biography and a history of journalism. It tells the tale of the two men who founded Time--Briton Hadden and Henry Luce--and how after Hadden's early death Luce essentially blotted out public awareness of his friend's role. This is revelatory on a number of levels. Naturally one wants to learn about a forgotten pioneer and his ideas and rise to success, and one wants to know how this pair of friends and rivals invented the newsmagazine, but it is also a bit staggering that a man who was loved and admired in his own brilliantly successful lifetime could have been quite so rapidly pushed into obscurity. People who had known him didn't forget about him, but Luce promptly removed his name from the masthead and smothered attempts to memorialize him and generally give him his due. Luce obviously deeply resented the fact that Hadden had been the magazine's primary founder, but they built the magazine as a team.
There were things I would have liked to better understand--like Luce's tormented denial of Hadden's significance--but when I reached the end of the book and began looking through the sources, it became clear that the author probably got as close to these men as anyone born after their deaths possibly can (barring discovery of a trove of important new evidence). This is a well researched book that speaks well of its (first-time) author's ability to ferret out and digest masses of material and interviews. I also like the author's acknowledgement of the splendid cover design, which I appreciate increasingly the more times I look at it.
June 8, 2010
Vivid details and interesting quotes fill the pages Wilner's book telling the complete, complex stories of both Britton Hadden and Henry Luce, from childhood to death. Within their accounts are riveting details about the entire creation of Time magazine and an excellent picture of society at the time. This book is a good depiction of how two men chose to spend their lives. Luce lost his passion for God in the midst of Time's reign in his life, and Hadden lost his life by choosing satisfaction in things that ultimately let him down.
It's a suspenseful narrative that grabs you from the start--a deathbed scene--and never lets you go right up til the end, a party that has to rival Truman Capote's "black and white party" as the best of the century. The book revolves around the friendship and rivalry of Briton Hadden and his classmate and business partner, Henry Luce. It turns out that Luce, the most famous publisher of the 20th century and the man who ran Time Inc all those years, actually did not shape the magazine or the company in its founding days. Luce stole the credit from Time's true innovator and genius, Briton Hadden, after his tragic and mysterious death at the age of 31--a stunning decline, death and betrayal.
Isaiah Wilner has obviously done his homework. A graduate of Yale and a worker himself on the famed Yale Daily News that Hadden and Luce once worked for, Wilner adds credibility to a story that leaves no stone unturned in the amazing record of how Time really began. He apparently had access to an archive of letters and documents that had been concealed for half a century. It has been a long time since I've read a book that has carried me away to a different time and place.
It's a suspenseful narrative that grabs you from the start--a deathbed scene--and never lets you go right up til the end, a party that has to rival Truman Capote's "black and white party" as the best of the century. The book revolves around the friendship and rivalry of Briton Hadden and his classmate and business partner, Henry Luce. It turns out that Luce, the most famous publisher of the 20th century and the man who ran Time Inc all those years, actually did not shape the magazine or the company in its founding days. Luce stole the credit from Time's true innovator and genius, Briton Hadden, after his tragic and mysterious death at the age of 31--a stunning decline, death and betrayal.
Isaiah Wilner has obviously done his homework. A graduate of Yale and a worker himself on the famed Yale Daily News that Hadden and Luce once worked for, Wilner adds credibility to a story that leaves no stone unturned in the amazing record of how Time really began. He apparently had access to an archive of letters and documents that had been concealed for half a century. It has been a long time since I've read a book that has carried me away to a different time and place.
October 23, 2012
This was a very sad and interesting story. I like Time magazine, so this was really interesting and insightful.
According to this book Briton Hadden was completely screwed over, and he knew it was coming. Dirty. I think its a tragedy that such a man was forgotten and purposely hidden away, personally I see that as admission on Henry Luces part that Hadden was more than what they made him out to be. It's just so dirty, Luce was always running around claiming ownership. I don't think Hadden really cared, since he was all about the creation and knowing what he did, but when his dear friend went around and never mentioned him, thats just sad.
Great Read, even if it did take me forever to finish XD
According to this book Briton Hadden was completely screwed over, and he knew it was coming. Dirty. I think its a tragedy that such a man was forgotten and purposely hidden away, personally I see that as admission on Henry Luces part that Hadden was more than what they made him out to be. It's just so dirty, Luce was always running around claiming ownership. I don't think Hadden really cared, since he was all about the creation and knowing what he did, but when his dear friend went around and never mentioned him, thats just sad.
Great Read, even if it did take me forever to finish XD
May 30, 2017
I almost exclusively read fiction novels, because I've found that non-fiction biographies tend to be written in a rather boring tone. This biography reads like a novel! Wilner's writing is positively addictive, and he frames the story in a way that would've earned Briton Hadden's enthusiastic approval. He wrote in Timestyle, and illustrated Hadden as a hero straight of the Iliad. By writing The Man Time Forgot, Isaiah Wilner redeemed Niven Busch of the inaccurate biography written for Hadden so long ago. My only wish is to sing this book's praises to every person who has ever heard of Time Magazine.
December 14, 2014
so far so good
April 10, 2008
Truly fascinating--a great look at the history of one of our most enduring periodicals (and of mags in general), told in an engaging, fun style.
April 30, 2008
good story set in interesting times.
October 29, 2014
Well written non-fiction book with an interesting story, espcially if you're interested in the magazine and news industry. Reads kind of like fiction, almost.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews