Volume 19, Number 7 · November 2, 1972
The Missionary
By Jason Epstein
Henry Luce
by William Swanberg
Scribner's, 529 pp., $12.50
Like Dreiser, the subject of one of his earlier biographies, William Swanberg is attracted by American grotesques: Jim Fisk, Pulitzer, Hearst, and now Henry Luce—men of vast and shallow appetites who rose and fell with their ability to celebrate the tastes and passions of their times; tribunes of the people whose special and largely unselfconscious gift was the power to satisfy in the populace its desire for justification, no matter what its sins, and to provide those images of virtue and success which an energetic and uncertain people require.
Review, 4134 words
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