Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post

Before movies, radio and television challenged the hegemony of the printed word, The Saturday Evening Post was the pre-eminent vehicle of mass culture in the United States. And to the extent that a mass medium can be the expression of a single individual, this magazine with a peak circulation of almost three million copies a week was seen as the expression of its editor, George Horace Lorimer. In this work, Cohn shows how Lorimer made the Post into a powerful magazine that both celebrated and helped to form the values of its time. Mixing quotes with commentary, he outlines the growth of the magazine through the mid-1930s and the ways its evolution fitted - and did not fit - into prevailing cultural and political values.