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Esquire

November 2007 Esquire cover
Editor in Chief David Granger
Categories Men's
Frequency Monthly
Circulation 700,000 1
First issue October 1933
Company Hearst Corporation
Country  United States
Language English
Website www.esquire.com/
ISSN 0014-0791

Esquire is a men's magazine by the Hearst Corporation with a strong literary tradition. Founded in 1933, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich. 2

Contents

History

Esquire began as a racy publication for men, published by David A. Smart and Arnold Gingrich. 2 3 It transformed itself into a more refined periodical with an emphasis on men's fashion and contributions by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the 1940s, the popularity of the Petty Girls and Vargas Girls provided a circulation boost. In the 1960s, Esquire helped pioneer the trend of New Journalism by publishing such writers as Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien, John Sack, Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. Under Harold Hayes, who ran it from 1961 to 1973, it became as distinctive as its oversized pages. The magazine shrank to the conventional 8½x11 in 1971.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Dorothy Parker wrote book reviews for Esquire, as noted by Daniel Itzkovitz:

Parker also produced a great deal of literary criticism, published over many decades in The New Yorker (under the title "Constant Reader") and, from 1958 to 1963, in Esquire. These reviews were often penned with the same unblinking brutality as her earlier drama reviews (of A.A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner, she said, "Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up"), although as often they were generously sensitive and enthusiastic. 4

The October 2008 issue is the first magazine to incorporate an animated cover. 100,000 copies with an e-ink electronic paper cover were to be distributed to outlets in the United States.citation needed

Fiction

From 1969 to 1976, Gordon Lish served as fiction editor for Esquire and became known as "Captain Fiction" because of the authors whose careers he assisted. Lish helped establish the career of writer Raymond Carver by publishing his short stories in Esquire, often over the objections of Hayes. Lish is noted for encouraging Carver's minimalism and publishing the short stories of Richard Ford. Using the influential publication as a vehicle to introduce new fiction by emerging authors, he promoted the work of such writers as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Barry Hannah, Cynthia Ozick and Reynolds Price.

Other authors appearing in Esquire at that time included William F. Buckley, Truman Capote, Murray Kempton, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ron Rosenbaum, Andrew Vachss and Garry Wills. The magazine's policy of nurturing young writing talent continued with Elizabeth Gilbert and others.

In February 1977, Esquire published "For Rupert - with no promises" as an unsigned work of fiction: this was the first time it had published a work without identifying the author. Readers speculated that it was the work of J. D. Salinger, the reclusive author best known for The Catcher in the Rye. Told in first-person, the story features events and Glass family names from the story "For Esmé with Love and Squalor". Gordon Lish is quoted as saying, "I tried to borrow Salinger's voice and the psychological circumstances of his life, as I imagine them to be now. And I tried to use those things to elaborate on certain circumstances and events in his fiction to deepen them and add complexity." 5

Design

The magazine was a canvas for many artists and illustrators like Abner Dean, Santiago Martinez Delgado, George Petty, TY Mahon and John Groth among others. Art directors have included Jean-Paul Goude, Paul Rand, Roger Black and Samuel Antupit; also during the 1960s using the techniques of print advertising, legendary adman George Lois, the youngest inductee into the Art Directors Hall of Fame, designed clever, eye-catching Esquire covers, such as Sonny Liston as Santa Claus and Andy Warhol drowning in a can of soup to illustrate an article on the death of the avant-garde. Lois' covers raised Esquire's circulation in ten years from 500,000 to two million.

For many years, Esquire has published its annual Dubious Achievement Awards, lampooning events of the preceding year. As a running gag, the annual article almost always displayed an old photo of Richard Nixon laughing, with the caption, "Why is this man laughing?" However, the February 2006 "Dubious Achievement Awards" used the caption under a photo of W. Mark Felt, the former FBI official revealed in 2005 to be the "Deep Throat" Watergate source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The magazine did continue the Nixon photo in February 2007, referring to a poll stating that George W. Bush had surpassed Nixon as the "worst president ever". Another running gag has been headlining one especially egregious achievement, "And then they went to Elaine's." (Elaine's is a popular restaurant in New York City.)

Esquire did not publish "Dubious Achievement Awards" for 2001 or 2002, but resumed them with the 2003 awards, published in the February 2004 issue.

For the October, 2008 75th Anniversary issue, it released what it billed as "The world's first E-Ink cover" - a battery-powered screen built into the cover of the issue. The spine of each of these issues reads "1 of only 100,000". The screen - which is layered under a printed transparency containing, among other things, the picture of Nixon laughing - reads "THE 21ST CENTURY BEGINS NOW →". The arrow points to a curl of binary code printed on the overlay. The words flash on and off, as do lighted boxes behind pictures printed on the overlay.

Current Editors

  • David Granger - Editor in Chief (U.S.A)
  • Peter Griffin - Deputy Editor
  • Mark Warren - Executive Editor
  • Lisa Hintelmann - Editorial Projects Director
  • John Kenney - Managing Editor
  • Ryan D'Agostino, David Katz, Ross McCammon - Articles Editors
  • Tyler Cabot, Richard Dorment - Features Editors
  • Peter Martin - Associate Editor
  • Tim Heffernan, Buddy Kite, David Walters - Assistant Editors
  • Fran Kessler - Special Assistant to the Editor in Chief
  • A. J. Jacobs - Editor at Large
  • Eric Gillin - Online Editor

Current Writers

Listen to

International editions

References

  1. ^ [1]
  2. ^ a b "Arnold Gingrich, 72, Dead; Was a Founder of Esquire", New York Times (July 10, 1976, Saturday). Retrieved on 21 July 2007. "Arnold Gingrich, one of the founders of Esquire magazine in 1933 and its principal guiding light in most of the years since then, died of cancer yesterday at his home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, Mr. Gingrich, who was given the title of founding editor earlier this year, was 72 years old." 
  3. ^ "Alfred Smart, Head Of Esquire Magazine.", New York Times (February 5, 1951, Monday). Retrieved on 21 July 2007. 
  4. ^ Itzkovitz, Daniel. "Dorothy Rothschild Parker (1893-1967)." Jewish Virtual Library
  5. ^ The Wall Street Journal (February 25, 1977).

See also

External links
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