Life is coming back. The magazine Henry Luce launched in 1936 returns to print on November 23, ninety years to the day after its first issue, as a $45 quarterly in an oversized 11-by-16-inch format with no print advertising. Karlie Kloss’s Bedford Media runs it, with Hugo Lindgren as editor and Richard Turley as creative director; Dotdash Meredith keeps the name and the archives. The first issue runs 248 pages under the title “Where Are We Now?” (TheWrap). The weekly ended in 1972, a monthly ran from 1978 to 2000, and the last incarnation, a newspaper supplement, stopped in 2007.
When UNN ran down the magazine’s high points this week — the Bourke-White first cover, Capa and Eisenstaedt, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea — it included one more: Life commissioned Norman Mailer to cover the Apollo 11 moon landing. That commission began Mailer’s years as a Life writer. His history with the magazine had not begun so well.
Mailer in Life
The attacks, 1948 and 1951. A full-page Life editorial of August 16, 1948, went after The Naked and the Dead for “slumming” and for a picture of American life “just as ugly, arid, boring and uncomfortable as a jungle campaign.” A second editorial, on April 16, 1951, called the novel “insidious slime.” J. Michael Lennon reads the first as “a harbinger of 50 years of preponderantly negative reviews from the Time-Life organization.” Mailer had his revenge of a kind: he was pleased, Lennon reports, when his third wife, Lady Jeanne Campbell, Luce’s former mistress, told him that Luce “suffered a bit” on learning of her relationship with Mailer.
The comeback, 1965. Life changed its tune with An American Dream. John W. Aldridge’s “The Big Comeback of Norman Mailer” (March 19) praised the novel, and Mailer liked the review well enough to pay to reprint the heart of it in Partisan Review (reception). On September 24 came Brock Brower’s “In This Corner, Norman Mailer: Never the Champion, Always the Challenger,” the first major biographical article on Mailer. He wrote to the editor complaining that he had been misquoted.
The campaign, 1969. Richard Woodley’s “A Literary Ticket for the 51st State” (June 30) covered Mailer and Jimmy Breslin’s run for mayor of New York.
Mailer’s own five pieces, 1969–1972. Then Life hired him.
- “A Fire on the Moon” (August 29, 1969). The first of three Apollo 11 installments, with Mailer on the cover. In his editor’s note, Ralph Graves called its 26,000 words “the longest non-fiction piece Life has ever published in one issue,” and quoted Mailer: “I can’t write anything in 5,000 words, and 10,000 words is just for poker money.”
- “The Psychology of Astronauts” (November 14, 1969).
- “A Dream of the Future’s Face” (January 9, 1970). The last of the three, which Mailer reordered and revised into Of a Fire on the Moon (Little, Brown, 1971).
- “Ego” (March 19, 1971). Mailer on the first Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight, eleven days after it, with some of the photographs taken by Frank Sinatra. It became King of the Hill the next month.
- “The Evil in the Room” (July 28, 1972). The Democratic convention in Miami, revised into part one of St. George and the Godfather.
That last piece ran in the weekly’s final year. The archive, moon issue included, stays with Dotdash Meredith. We would gladly see it again.