November 23:

1936 : First issue of Life is published

On November 23, 1936, the first issue of the pictorial
magazine Life is published, featuring a cover photo of
the Fort Peck Dam by Margaret Bourke-White.

Life actually had its start earlier in the 20th
century as a different kind of magazine: a weekly
humor publication, not unlike today's The New Yorker
in its use of tart cartoons, humorous pieces and
cultural reporting. When the original Life folded
during the Great Depression, the influential American
publisher Henry Luce bought the name and re-launched
the magazine as a picture-based periodical on this day
in 1936. By this time, Luce had already enjoyed great
success as the publisher of Time, a weekly news
magazine.

From his high school days, Luce was a newsman, serving
with his friend Briton Hadden as managing editors of
their school newspaper. This partnership continued
through their college years at Yale University, where
they acted as chairmen and managing editors of the
Yale Daily News, as well as after college, when Luce
joined Hadden at The Baltimore News in 1921. It was
during this time that Luce and Hadden came up with the
idea for Time. When it launched in 1923, it was with
the intention of delivering the world's news through
the eyes of the people who made it.

Whereas the original mission of Time was to tell the
news, the mission of Life was to show it. In the words
of Luce himself, the magazine was meant to provide a
way for the American people "to see life; to see the
world; to eyewitness great events ... to see things
thousands of miles away ... to see and be amazed; to
see and be instructed ... to see, and to show ..."
Luce set the tone of the magazine with Margaret
Bourke-White's stunning cover photograph of the Fort
Peck Dam, which has since become an icon of the 1930s
and the great public works completed under President
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Life was an overwhelming success in its first year of
publication. Almost overnight, it changed the way
people looked at the world by changing the way people
could look at the world. Its flourish of images
painted vivid pictures in the public mind, capturing
the personal and the public, and putting it on display
for the world to take in. At its peak, Life had a
circulation of over 8 million and it exerted
considerable influence on American life in the
beginning and middle of the 20th century.

With picture-heavy content as the driving force behind
its popularity,the magazine suffered as television
became society's predominant means of communication.
Life ceased running as a weekly publication in 1972,
when it began losing audience and advertising dollars
to television. In 2004, however, it resumed weekly
publication as a supplement to U.S. newspapers. At its
re-launch, its combined circulation was once again in
the millions.

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