The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine

By Isaiah Wilner and Isaiah Wilner

Book Overview

Here is the tale of The Man Time Forgot: the story of Briton Hadden, the genius behind Time magazine, and his betrayal by Henry R. Luce. The true story of their tortured friendship has never before been told.

Friends, collaborators, and childhood rivals, Hadden and Luce are not yet twenty-five when they start the nation's first newsmagazine at the outset of the Roaring Twenties. Millionaires at thirty, together they lay the foundation for a media empire. But their partnership is explosive and their rivalry ferocious, inspired by envy as well as love. When Hadden dies at the age of thirty-one, Luce begins to bury the legacy of the giant he was never able to best.

In this groundbreaking biography, Isaiah Wilner offers the first full account of the birth of Time. He paints a fascinating portrait of a man whose mind dreams of everything, from the weekly newsmagazine to Life, Sports Illustrated, and the radio quiz show, and he presents a major reappraisal of the most significant media figure of the twentieth century.

The story travels from the tomb of Yale's storied secret society, Skull and Bones, to high-society Europe and South America, following the friendship of two brilliant and opposite souls who inspire one another to the pinnacle of earthly success. The young men emerge from the crucible of the Great War with an idea—Hadden's idea—that shapes the way Americans will think about the world. By making the news accessible, and amusing readers as it informs them, Hadden's Time sets the course for modern journalism into the twenty-first century.

Isaiah Wilner brings to life this remarkable story in The Man Time Forgot, a book as stylish, passionate, and provocative as Briton Hadden himself.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060505494
• ISBN13: 9780060505493
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Well Done

Isaiah Wilner has obviously done his homework. A graduate of Yale and a worker himself on the famed Yale Daily News that Hadden and Luce once worked for, Wilner adds credibility to a story that leaves no stone unturned in the amazing record of how Time really began. Vivid details and interesting quotes fill the pages that tell the complete, complex stories of both Britton Hadden and Henry Luce, from childhood to death. Within their accounts are riveting details about the entire creation of Time magazine, including early workers, tricks of the trade, and an excellent picture of society at the time. This book is excellent for journalists and entrepreneurs, but it is also a good depiction of how two men chose to spend their lives. Luce lost his passion for God in the midst of Time's reign in his life, and Hadden lost his life by choosing satisfaction in things that ultimately let him down. Personal applications can be drawn from this account as well as business and journalistic lessons. Well done, Isaiah Wilner. Your time was well-spent.

Brilliantly Written Story of Modern Media Founders

This book by a first-time author is sensational, I enjoyed every page of it. The story should be read by everyone working in the media today. Stylistically, it is a true innovation. He brings to life every major event in Hadden's life, and gives a fair assessment of Henry Luce's cover-up. I recommend this book to everyone. It was a quick, enjoyable weekend read. Very educational.

Fantastic storytelling

The Man Time Forgot is a true pleasure to read. It's hard to fathom that the history of such an important organization could be lost, but who knew that its rediscovery could be such fun? Wilner has crafted a truly fascinating tale, elucidating the enigmatic relationship between the modern mass media's arguably two most important figures. Well researched and even better written, the anecdotes almost turn the pages themselves and the argument resurrecting the legacy of Briton Hadden is even more compelling.

Pioneering Style, Extraordinary Story

Isaiah Wilner's new biography, The Man TIME Forgot, does for Time Magazine what Time Magazine did for the news - it is less concerned with "how much it includes between its covers - but in how much it gets off the pages into the minds of its readers." Wilner indeed gets his remarkable story off the pages - and how! Though the conflict and tragedy at the core of the book help make it a page turner, what really marks this book as a must-read are Wilner's stylistic innovations. He fuses the pioneering sumptuousness of Indian author Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things and the irreverence of the 1920's "Timestyle" in a way that transforms what might otherwise be a dry corporate history into a poetic delight. He's bringing the beauty of the Roy style to non-fiction, paying as much attention to the art of writing as to the information he's relating. But the style never obscures the fascinating epic at the core of the book. Instead, the sparkling sentences illuminate how the titanic personal and professional battle between Time's two founders generated a creative tension that was a prerequisite for Time's transformation of American journalism and the 20th century mind. At the heart of Wilner's book is the story of the nearly-forgotten Britton Hadden, who along with the currently far more famous Henry Luce, founded Time in 1923. Despite Luce's later greater fame, it was Hadden who, as early as his grade school days, dreamt up the idea of a publication that would synthesize the infinite information available in the modern world into a series of pithy and irreverent stories full of personality and pictures. Hadden believed that such a presentation would break through the information overload afflicting Americans as early as the 1870's, and result in a more enlightened nation. Of course, transforming such an idea into reality wasn't simple, even for two well-born Yale graduates who were members of the Skull and Bones secret society. Launching a national magazine was an expensive venture. Wilner's writing gives Hadden and Luce's hunt for capital the thrill of a hunt for a ticking time bomb. Under the spell of Wilner's prose, I found myself hanging on every meeting with a financier or wealthy family friend - hoping they'd raise the money to keep the magazine going, even though I already knew that they'd succeed. But as Wilner details in this extraordinarily well-researched volume, Time had to overcome more than the skepticism of aging plutocrats to keep the magazine afloat. The thirty years prior to the founding of Time had seen an explosion of newspapers and magazines, and new media like movies and radio were beginning to compete for the populace's attention. Though nothing quite like Time existed, Hadden and Luce had to convince people who had never heard of their magazine that their product was different and better. They barnstormed the country, giving local chambers of commerce and university students a current events quiz, showing the local bigwigs

Richly detailed and fun

I found The Man Time Forgot on a friend's recommendation, picked it up and could not put it down. Read it in less than a day. I think it's going to be a huge success. It's a suspenseful narrative that grabs you from the start--a deathbed scene--and never lets you go right up til the end, a party that has to rival Truman Capote's "black and white party" as the best of the century. The book revolves around the friendship and rivalry of Briton Hadden and his classmate and business partner, Henry Luce. It turns out that Luce, the most famous publisher of the 20th century and the man who ran Time Inc all those years, actually did not shape the magazine or the company in its founding days. Luce stole the credit from Time's true innovator and genius, Briton Hadden, after his tragic and mysterious death at the age of 31--a stunning decline, death and betrayal that is expounded upon in heartbreaking detail. The writer apparently got access to a Time Inc. archive and found a private cache of letters and documents that had been concealed for half a century. It has been a long time since I've read a book that has carried me away to a different time and place. Reading this book, I felt like I could actually see what was going on. The characters came to life on the page and I felt like I was transported back to the Roaring Twenties.