20 Magazine Editors Who Secretly Decided Who Became Famous

When Hugh Hefner created Playboy in his apartment in Chicago at the end of 1953, he needed a great photo for the cover. He did not take it himself. Instead, he used a photo of Marilyn Monroe that Tom Kelley had taken several years earlier, before she was a major Hollywood star. Hefner paid Kelley $500 for the image and ran it on the cover and in the center of the first issue. It sold out quickly.

From 1934 to 1957, Carmel Snow edited Harper’s Bazaar, a fashion magazine. In March of 1943, she put a then-unknown 18-year-old model named Betty Bacall on the cover. Nancy “Slim” Keith, wife of Hollywood director Howard Hawks, saw the cover on a newsstand and showed it to him. Hawks signed Betty Bacall for his film To Have and Have Not, and she took the screen name Lauren Bacall. One magazine cover, passed through two more hands, started a Hollywood career.

For decades, starting at the turn of the century, George Horace Lorimer edited The Saturday Evening Post, a popular weekly magazine. In 1916, Lorimer purchased the first two cover paintings from an unknown young illustrator named Norman Rockwell. That began a collaboration that would last for decades, with Rockwell creating hundreds of covers for the publication. A few years later, Lorimer started paying struggling writer F. Scott Fitzgerald as much as $4,000 per story, or about $60,000 in today’s dollars, funding the period in which Fitzgerald penned his great novels.

In 1914, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap started editing a Chicago literary magazine called The Little Review. With encouragement from poet Ezra Pound, they began serializing the new novel of an Irish writer named James Joyce, called Ulysses. This story began appearing in March 1918. However, the US Post Office confiscated and burned four issues, claiming that they were obscene. In February 1921, both editors were found guilty of publishing obscene material, fined $100, and had their fingerprints taken. However, neither ever spent time in jail.

Harold Ross started The New Yorker in 1925 and operated the publication through 1951. He brought James Thurber on staff in 1927 to help out with editorial chores. When fellow New Yorker writer E.B. White persuaded Ross to print Thurber’s humorous essays and quick sketches, Thurber became one of the most enduring contributors to the magazine. In 1932, Ross hired Charles Addams as a cartoonist. Addams would eventually create the basis for The Addams Family.

Arnold Gingrich co-founded Esquire magazine in Chicago in October 1933. He lured novelist Ernest Hemingway with the promise of a high salary and artistic independence. Hemingway’s work graced 28 of the magazine’s first 33 issues. In the late 1930s, Gingrich was underwriting a struggling F. Scott Fitzgerald, buying his Pat Hobby stories. The monthly pin-ups by George Petty and Alberto Vargas turned these two illustrators into household names.

In September of 1937, John W. Campbell Jr. became the editor of the science fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction, and in 1938, he found a teenage writer named Isaac Asimov. Regular visits with Campbell eventually led Asimov to start writing the Foundation series, as well as the “Three Laws of Robotics,” which Asimov said Campbell stated outright, although Campbell insisted Asimov had hinted at them before. In 1939, Campbell published the first story of Robert A. Heinlein, which helped launch science fiction’s golden age.

Dashiell Hammett stopped writing fiction to earn his living by doing advertising copy until Joseph “Cap” Shaw, editor of pulp magazine Black Mask from 1926, convinced him to resume writing stories. From September 1929 to January 1930, Shaw published Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon in five episodes and introduced detective Sam Spade. In doing so, he helped invent the hardboiled crime novel. In 1933, he bought Raymond Chandler’s first published detective story.

In 1912, Harriet Monroe launched Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in Chicago. Her London correspondent, the poet Ezra Pound, mailed her a poem from an unheralded 26-year-old American named T.S. Eliot in late 1914. Monroe was hesitant about “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but Pound urged her on. By June 1915, she decided to print it, launching the modernist poetry movement.

Farnsworth Wright edited the Chicago pulp Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940 while suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He published horror writer H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” in February 1928, and in December 1932, he accepted writer Robert E. Howard’s “The Phoenix on the Sword” story, which introduced Conan the Barbarian. He was not an easy mark. For instance, he passed up Lovecraft’s masterpiece, At the Mountains of Madness. But it was Weird Tales that served as the primary home for both men’s work.

The English Review, founded by Ford Madox Ford in London in 1908, received its first D.H. Lawrence poems in June of 1909. Ford read them and determined that the author, a 23-year-old Nottinghamshire schoolmaster, was a genius. He published them that November and sent Lawrence’s first novel to William Heinemann for publication. When Ford later edited a magazine in Paris, he employed Ernest Hemingway as sub-editor.

Howells was still an assistant editor at The Atlantic Monthly when he wrote a glowing review of Mark Twain’s travel book The Innocents Abroad in December 1869, launching a lifelong friendship. Twain was then known mostly for rowdy western humor, not serious literature. After Howells became the magazine’s editor-in-chief in 1871, he serialized Twain’s Old Times on the Mississippi and, later, two novels by a then little-known Henry James.

From around 1914, Frank Crowninshield was editor of Vanity Fair magazine in New York for two decades. He hired an unknown young writer named Dorothy Rothschild for his magazine, paying her $12 for “Any Porch.” Shortly thereafter, he got her a job at sister magazine Vogue. A few years later, he had her on board as the drama critic for Vanity Fair, though she was then writing under the name Dorothy Parker. She, along with hires like Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, would become the nucleus of the Algonquin Round Table.

McClure’s Magazine began publication in New York in 1893, when S.S. McClure recruited journalist Ida Tarbell to spend months digging into Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Lincoln Steffens, another of McClure’s contributors, investigated municipal corruption on McClure’s tab. Both stories appeared in the January 1903 issue of McClure’s, a publication that launched “muckraking” journalism, as President Theodore Roosevelt termed it. McClure also hired future novelist Willa Cather as managing editor in 1906.

A man named Bernarr Macfadden edited Physical Culture magazine, which was based in New York City and designed to encourage regular exercise and weightlifting. In the early 1920s, Macfadden sponsored national “World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man” competitions, and in 1922, he gave the title and $1,000 to an Italian-born immigrant named Angelo Siciliano. Macfadden renamed him “Charles Atlas.” That early magazine feature helped fuel the bodybuilder’s subsequent mail-order fitness empire.

In April 1926, Luxembourgian immigrant Hugo Gernsback started Amazing Stories in New York, the first magazine devoted entirely to stories of speculation and invention. He listed readers’ home addresses in the fan letters column, allowing fans to locate one another and send letters for the first time. He also coined the term “scientifiction,” which was later shortened to science fiction. In addition, he published the 1928 novella introducing Buck Rogers, written by Philip Francis Nowlan. Gernsback was infamous for underpaying his authors, leading H.P. Lovecraft to nickname him “Hugo the Rat.”

Edna Woolman Chase went from the mail room to editor of Vogue magazine, a role she held for many years, and employed Edward Steichen as the chief photographer for Condé Nast, Vogue’s parent company, during the 1920s. She was instrumental in introducing studio fashion photography. She later brought in Cecil Beaton, the renowned British photographer. She is credited with organizing the first major fashion show in the United States, showing collections of French fashions whose production was disrupted by World War I. This contributed to making New York City a global fashion capital.

The most prominent American literary critic was H.L. Mencken, who co-edited The Smart Set magazine and started The American Mercury in the 1920s. He was also responsible for publishing the first works by the soon-to-be Nobel Prize-winning writer Eugene O’Neill in the late 1910s. A few years after he began publishing The American Mercury, he also introduced Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes to a larger audience.

In 1851, Robert Bonner, an Irish immigrant, purchased a failing financial journal and transformed it into The New York Ledger, a weekly publication of fiction and political commentary masquerading as a newspaper. In 1855, he offered Fanny Fern, a pen name for Sara Willis, an unprecedented $100 a column if she would write only for him. That arrangement made Fern America’s highest-paid writer and drove the Ledger’s circulation over 400,000.

From the 1830s, Sarah Josepha Hale edited Godey’s Lady’s Book, a Philadelphia magazine for women. Whereas most American publishers freely pirated British writing, Hale required her writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to be paid at top rates. She also published 18-year-old Frances Hodgson Burnett’s first short story in 1868, decades before Burnett wrote The Secret Garden. As a result of this editorial policy, the magazine sold more than 150,000 copies.

This content was created with the help of AI.