Ken Burns' Ernest Hemingway documentary on PBS mentioned that Hemingway and his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, served as war correspondents for Collier's magazine.
Gellhorn covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II for Collier's, and she brought Hemingway to the magazine to cover the liberation of Europe from the Nazis after D-Day, as the series relates. Hemingway's ham-handed undermining of Gellhorn at the magazine led to their divorce.
The program’s reference to Collier's bade me to do some Internet research about the magazine.
Founded in 1888 by Peter Fenelon Collier, the once popular publication was a trailblazer in investigative reporting, fiction, photography, layout and printing technology. The magazine published leading authors, reporters and cartoonists, reaching a circulation in the millions before World War II.
Collier's was a hybrid of Life, Look, Time, the Saturday Evening Post and more intellectual magazines like the Atlantic and Harper's. Its Wikipedia entry makes it appear most like the New Yorker.
As Americans turned to television during the 1950s, Colliers began bleeding circulation, closing in 1957. Over the years, once flourishing publications like the Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review of Books, Life, Look, Redbook, MacLeans, True and Mademoiselle joined Collier's in the magazine cemetery.
In Hemingway and Gellhorn's glory years, magazines supported prosperous careers of multiple journalists, fiction writers, cartoonists, editors and photographers.
Although fewer Americans had even high school educations, the population read an astonishing variety of magazines and newspapers through the early 1960s. While general literacy might have been lower, people had a deeper basic knowledge of science, literature, civics and public affairs.
All in all, the once glowing promise of Internet publishing dims as consolidation and layoffs mount. The golden age of magazines will never return.
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