Luce, who had already founded Time and Fortune, bought the old humour magazine Life for its name and relaunched it on November 23, 1936, convinced that pictures could tell a story rather than merely illustrate one. The first issue sold for ten cents and carried Bourke-White's cover image of a New Deal dam in Montana, plus five pages of photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Demand overwhelmed the company's forecasts.
Luce's prospectus promised readers the chance "to see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events". The founding editors, John Shaw Billings and Daniel Longwell, filled the oversized pages with photo essays that treated pictures as the story itself, and Bourke-White's cover, a monumental view of the Fort Peck Dam spillway built under the Works Progress Administration, set the tone.
The print run for the first issue was 380,000 copies. Within four months Life was selling more than a million a week, and it soon challenged The Saturday Evening Post as the country's biggest weekly. During the Second World War its photographers and correspondents, several of them women, brought the fighting into American living rooms.
Television eventually took Life's audience and its advertisers. The weekly edition ended in 1972, but for more than three decades the magazine had shaped how Americans saw their country and the world.
Key people: Henry Luce, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt