Esquire (magazine)
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Esquire is a magazine for men owned by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1933, it flourished during the Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.
Although the magazine began as a racy publication for men, it soon transformed itself into a more refined periodical, becoming well-known for its emphasis on men's fashion and frequent contributions by literary giants such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the 1940s, the magazine's popularity increased, partly due to its coverage of the famous Vargas Girls. In the 1960s, Esquire helped pioneer the trend of New Journalism by publishing such writers as Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, John Sack and Tim O'Brien.
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[edit] Fiction
Gordon Lish served as fiction editor at Esquire magazine from 1969 to 1976 where he became known as "Captain Fiction" for the number of authors whose careers he assisted. He is noted for encouraging Raymond Carver's minimalism and 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 Cynthia Ozick, Reynolds Price, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Barry Hannah. Other authors whom it published at this time included William F. Buckley, Truman Capote, Murray Kempton, Garry Wills, Ron Rosenbaum, and Malcolm Muggeridge. It has continued its practice of nurturing young writing talent, including Elizabeth Gilbert.
[edit] Design
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 during the 1960s, such as Andy Warhol drowning in a can of soup to illustrate an article on the death of the avant-garde and Sonny Liston as Santa Claus. 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, which lampoon events of the preceding year. As a running gag, the annual article almost always includes 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 Bob Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's "Deep Throat" Watergate source. Image:Esquire.jpg
