LORIMER, GEORGE HORACE 1867-1937

Magazine editor

The Great American Magazine

During the 1920s The Saturday Evening Post was the most successful magazine in America, perhaps in the world. It reached a peak circulation of 3 million; for a nickel its readers bought two hundred pages with fiction and articles by the most popular and best-paid writers. The man responsible was George Horace Lorimer, a devout proponent of the gospel of business and a good judge of writing.

Success Story

Lorimer lived the American success story. The son of a Baptist minister, he dropped out of Yale after one year at the urging of Philip D. Armour, head of the meatpacking firm, and rose to head of the Armour canning department. After his own grocery business failed, Lorimer became a reporter. In 1898 he was hired as literary editor of The Saturday Evening Post, published by Cyrus H. K. Curtis, owner of The Ladies' Home Journal. The Post was moribund, its chief asset a shaky claim to having been founded by Benjamin Franklin. Lorimer was assigned to edit the magazine while Curtis was recruiting an editor in chief. Lorimer did it so well that he was made editor in chief, a position he held for thirty-nine years. For more than twenty years Lorimer's Post had a significant influence in shaping American values and American taste through its fiction, nonfiction, and advertising. Lorimer read everything that was printed in his magazine and was personally responsible for the editorial pages, which were probusiness and isolationist. He was the author of three books—one of which, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to his Son (1902), a highly successful work of business fiction, was serialized in the Post.

Contributors

Lorimer treated writers generously and recruited a corps of contributors who became associated with the Post and thereby built reader loyalty. Although intellectuals dismissed the Post stories as escapism and commercial entertainment, the Post published Ring W. Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, John P. Marquand, Sinclair Lewis, John Galsworthy, Rudyard Kipling, Booth Tarkington, and Kenneth Roberts during the 1920s. Prominent illustrators worked for the Post, and Norman Rockwell's many covers became identified with the magazine. The 6 March 1926 issue had 238 pages with ten articles, ranging in subject from the export trade to the making of dictionaries, and ten stories, including Fitzgerald's "Adolescent Marriage." There were 117 fullpage ads, many of them for automobiles or automotive products.

Loss of Influence

During the 1930s Lorimer opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and The Saturday Evening Post, out of touch with prevailing public opinion, gradually lost much of its political and cultural influence. George Horace Lorimer retired in 1936, the year before his death.

Sources:

Jan Cohn, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989);

John Tebbel, George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948).

Saturday Evening Post, The, (1821–1969, 1971– ),Philadelphia weekly, whose first issue appeared August 18, 1821, although beginning in 1897 the cover page has carried the statement that it was founded by Franklin in 1728. Its only connection with Franklin is that it was originally issued from an office at one time occupied by his Pennsylvania Gazette, one of whose later publishers founded the Post. Its original purpose was to furnish light Sunday reading for Philadelphians, and its contributors included Cooper, Poe, N.P. Willis, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Its modern period did not come until it was purchased by Cyrus H.K. Curtis (1897). It was edited by George Horace Lorimer from 1899 to 1936. He increased its circulation from 1800 to 3,000,000 copies weekly by making it a popular magazine for the average American, and publishing stories with mass appeal. He also emphasized advertising, to which about 60 percent of the c. 125 pages were devoted. A Treasury of selections appeared in 1954. Changing managements tinkered with design, editorial policy, and frequency of issue to offset loss of advertising revenue in the 1960s, but in 1969 the Post succumbed. It was revived as a quarterly in 1971, and is now published six times a year.

Lorimer, George Horace (1867–1937), as editor (1899–1936) of The Saturday Evening Post raised the magazine from a circulation of 1800 to 3,000,000 by both his business acumen and his sense of middle‐class taste. He laid much stress on business as a subject in articles and in fiction, including Frank Norris's The Pit, George Randolph Chester's Get‐Rich‐Quick Wallingford series, and stories by Dreiser, Lewis, Booth Tarkington, and Peter B. Kyne. However, his range of interest was wider as indicated by publication of works by Stephen Crane, Jack London, Fitzgerald, and Marquand. He himself wrote the uplifting and hortatory Letters from a Self‐Made Merchant to His Son (1902).