First Issue Of Life Magazine Views
Publisher John Ames Mitchell was a man with strong opinions and the perfect forum for voicing them. He was not shy about using his magazine to campaign on different social issues, with the result that he and his magazine were frequently cited in lawsuits. He was an habitual winner of the suits and this only increased his popularity and that of his magazine. In publishing the first Life magazine, Mitchell introduced the first humor magazine to find acceptance in respectable homes. It is possible to stay in the Original Life Publishing building, which is now the Herold Square Hotel - much of the Original Life magazine cover art is framed on their walls.
Mitchell brought together and often helped to introduce many of the artists and writers who later became well known American favorites. For example, Norman Rockwell's first cover for Life, Tain't You, was published May 10, 1917. Rockwell's paintings were featured on Life's cover 28 times between 1917 and 1924. Robert Ripley published his first cartoon in Life in 1908, later becoming the first publisher of Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame. Charles Dana Gibson sold his first professional pen-and-ink drawing to Mitchell in 1886, later creating some of the famous Gibson girls for their first appearance in print ... in Life magazine. The very popular John Held, Jr. contributed cover art with jazz musicians and flappers. Among many famous names between the covers, we find Dorothy Parker (poetry and prose), Franklin Pierce Adams (poetry), Robert E. Sherwood (silent film critic), and Robert Benchley (drama editor).
Perhaps one of the best-known pictures printed in the magazine was Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph of a nurse in a sailor’s arms, snapped on August 27, 1945, as they celebrated VJ Day in New York City. The magazine's place in the history of photojournalism is considered its most important contribution to publishing. Luce purchased the rights to the name from the publishers of the first Life but sold its subscription list and features to another magazine; there was no editorial continuity between the two publications.
The motto of the first issue of Life was, “While there’s Life, there's hope.” The new magazine set forth its principles and policies to its readers: “We wish to have some fun in this paper... We shall try to domesticate as much as possible of the casual cheerfulness that is drifting about in an unfriendly world... We shall have something to say about religion, about politics, fashion, society, literature, the stage, the stock exchange, and the police station, and we will speak out what is in our mind as fairly, as truthfully, and as decently as we know how.”[3]
First Issue Of Life Magazine Images
