LIBRARY NOTES
Alan Brinkley
The Missions of Henry R. Luce
Tuesday, October 15, 1996 at 6:30 PM
Temple Israel, 112 East 75th Street
Henry Luce grew up in two very different worlds - the world of his parents, Presbyterian missionaries in China, which emphasized discipline, restraint, piety, and good worlds; and the world of Hotchkiss and Yale and Skull and Bones, which valued social distinction and conventional professional success. Luce's lifelong - and never entirely successful - effort to reconcile those two worlds helped determine his career, the powerful magazines he founded and controlled, and to some degree, the new, national, middle-class culture of the mid-twentieth century that his empire did much to shape.
In his lecture, Alan Brinkley will examine the rise of Luce from his childhood in China to the early years of the founding of Time and Life magazines.
Professor of American History at Columbia University, Alan Brinkley is the author of Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression,
The End of Reform: End Deal Liberalism in Recession and War and The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People. He is at work on a biography of Henry R. Luce, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf.
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