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Saturday Evening Post

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The Saturday Evening Post was a weekly magazine published in the United States from 1821 to 1969. First published as a 4-page newspaper, by 1855 the expanded newspaper had a circulation of 90,000. By the late 1890s, the paper had fallen into deep financial difficulties, and in October, 1897, it was purchased for $1,000 by Cyrus H. Curtis, the owner of the Ladies' Home Journal. The Saturday Evening Post was redesigned and on January, 1898, reappeared as a journal which covered business, public affairs and romance. Now illustrations appeared on every page.

In 1899 George Horace Lorimer was hired as editor-in-chief of the magazine, and he began to hire more illustrious journalists, and purchased publishing rights for different literary works, including those of Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane. With his improvements, by December, 1908, the journal was selling over a million copies a week, and by the end of 1913 had reached 2,000,000.

Artist Norman Rockwell did covers and illustrations for the magazine from 1916 through 1963.

Last updated: September 27, 2004.

 
 
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1821The Saturday Evening Post. Founded by Philadelphia printers Charles Alexander and William Coate Atkinson, the Post featured news, household tips, essays, and poems for light Sunday reading before the existence of Sunday newspapers. Its popularity grew after the owners acquired several competitors and installed Henry Peterson as editor in 1846. It featured contributions from Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth, Emerson Bennett, "Fanny Fern" (Sarah Payson Willis), and other popular writers. Its trademark cover woodcuts first appeared in 1863. After a sharp decline, the Post was sold to Cyrus H. K. Curtis in 1897, who increased circulation into the millions with aggressive subscription sales and advertising. Curtis played up the legend that Benjamin Franklin had been involved with the magazine's founding, altering the founding date from 1821 to 1728 and the magazine's volume 77 to 170. The Post remained successful until 1962, when it lost $4 million, and it was finally suspended in 1969. Revived in 1971, it was offered bimonthly.

 
Wikipedia: the Saturday Evening Post
Note: There have been other minor publications also called the Saturday Evening Post; several were/are local British newspapers.
A cover of the Saturday Evening Post from 1903, illustrated by George Gibbs.
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A cover of the Saturday Evening Post from 1903, illustrated by George Gibbs.

The Saturday Evening Post was a weekly magazine published in the United States from August 4, 1821 to February 8, 1969. From 1897, it was published by Curtis Publishing Company. Curtis claimed to be descended from The Pennsylvania Gazette founded in 1728 by Benjamin Franklin, although the magazine's first issue was published more than 30 years after Franklin's death. According to historians, and the circulation numbers, the magazine gained prominent status under the leadership of his editor (1899-1937) George Horace Lorimer.

Description and History

Its contents consisted primarily of articles on current events and pieces of well-written popular fiction in mainstream genres, at least one of which was usually run in serial format over several issues. These were supplemented by single-panel cartoons, small human-interest, humorous or poetic filler pieces (often reader-contributed), editorials, a letter column, and quality interior illustrations of both stories and advertising plus illustrated covers. In March 1916 Lorimer agreed to meet Norman Rockwell, a 22 year old artist from New York. He immediately accepted two front covers he had produced and commissioned three more. Rockwell did covers and illustrations for the magazine through 1963, and gained his public fame by these works; several of these are among his critically best-acclaimed works. Other artists also gained fame by contributing Post covers, for example Nebraska artist John Philip Falter. Fiction authors included the likes of John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, John P. Marquand, Paul Gallico, Kay Boyle, C. S. Forester, Hammond Innes, Sax Rohmer, Louis L'Amour, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rex Stout, Joseph C. Lincoln, C.S. Lewis, Brian Cleeve, and Ray Bradbury.

Along with many other general-interest magazines, the Post saw a decline in the late 1950s and 1960s, generally attributed to the rise of television. In addition, interest in the Post's style of fiction and its conservative editorial bent declined during the advent of American counterculture. "Name" authors were drawn to more libertine magazines like Playboy as a high-status and high-paying venue for their work. Increasingly, the Post turned to articles on more current and fashionable topics, using cheaper photographic covers and advertisements.

An account of the final years of the Post (1962-1969) by Otto Friedrich, the magazine's last managing editor, was published as Decline and Fall (Harper & Row, 1970). Friedrich acknowledged that times were against the Post, but insisted that the magazine was of high quality and appreciated by its readers, attributing the financial difficulties largely to unimaginative and incompetent corporate management at Curtis.

The demise of the Post came after the magazine ran an article implying that football coaches Paul "Bear" Bryant and Wally Butts had conspired to "fix" a game between the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia. Butts sued and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where it became a landmark libel case (Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, 388 U.S. 130 (1967)). Butts ultimately won, and the magazine was ordered to pay $3,060,000 in damages.

In 1971, the Post was revived, first as a quarterly, then as a bi-monthly publication specializing in health and medical breakthroughs. The magazine is currently published six times a year by the "Benjamin Franklin Literary & Medical Society", a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

In 1958, Mad Magazine published a satire of the Post titled "The Saturday Evening Pest," whose first page shows a spoof of a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving scene (pipe-smoking painter "Norman Shockwell" smirks at the reader from one corner); the cover announces articles such as "Our State Department--Do We Need It?" by Joseph and Stewart Allslop" (Joseph and Stewart Alsop) and "This Isn't Exactly What I Had in Mind" by Benjamin Franklin.

Editors

(from the purchase by Curtis, 1898)

Cover Gallery

See also

Popular Culture

  • Steve Allen wrote a song inspired by the magazine's title.

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