Life (stylized as LIFE) is an American news magazine. Life was launched in 1936 as a weekly publication, in 1972 it transitioned to publishing "special" issues before returning as a monthly from 1978 to 2000. From 2000 to 2026, the magazine was published as irregular "special" issues and is scheduled to relaunch in late 2026.
Life was launched on November 23, 1936, after Henry Luce purchased the 1883 humour magazine Life for its name. Originally published by Time Inc., since 2021 the magazine has been owned by People Inc and since 2026 is published by Bedford Media.
The magazine's place in the history of photojournalism is considered one of its most important contributions to the world of publishing. From 1936 to the 1960s, Life was a wide-ranging general-interest magazine known for its photojournalism. During this period, it was one of the most popular magazines in the United States, with its circulation regularly reaching a quarter of the U.S. population.
History 20th century
Weekly news magazine
In 1936, publisher Henry Luce purchased a humor magazine called Life for US$92,000 because he wanted the name for his company, Time Inc., to use. Time Inc. sold Life subscription list and features to another humor magazine, Judge. Convinced that pictures could tell a story instead of just illustrating text, Luce launched the new Life on November 23, 1936, with John Shaw Billings and Daniel Longwell as founding editors. The third magazine published by Luce, after Time in 1923 and Fortune in 1930, Life developed as the definitive photo magazine in the U.S., giving as much space and importance to images as to words. The first issue of this version of Life, which sold for ten cents (worth $ in ), had five pages of Alfred Eisenstaedt's photographs.
In planning the weekly news magazine, Luce circulated a confidential prospectus within Time Inc. in 1936, which described his vision for the new Life magazine, and what he viewed as its unique purpose. Life magazine was to be the first publication with a focus on photographs that enabled the American public:
To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man's work—his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed... —Prospectus for a New MagazineSebastian Smee, "In Life, as in art, every picture had stories to tell", The Washington Post, October 23, 2022, p. E12.Life in 2012: The Year in 12 Galleries . Retrieved September 24, 2015
Luce's first issue cover depicted the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, a Works Progress Administration project, photographed by Margaret Bourke-White.
The format of Life in 1936 was a success: the text was condensed into captions for 50 pages of photographs. The magazine was printed on heavily coated paper and cost readers only a dime . The magazine's circulation was beyond the company's predictions, going from 380,000 copies of the first issue to more than one million a week four months later."Pictorial to Sleep", Time, March 8, 1937. It soon challenged The Saturday Evening Post, then the largest-circulation weekly in the country. The magazine's success stimulated many imitators, such as Look, which was founded a year later in 1937 and ran until 1971.
Luce moved Life into its own building at 19 West 31st Street, a Beaux-Arts building constructed in 1894. Later Life moved its editorial offices to 9 Rockefeller Plaza.
A co-founder of the new Life magazine, Longwell served as managing editor from 1944 to 1946, and as chairman of the board of editors until his retirement in 1954. He was credited for publishing Winston Churchill's The Second World War and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.
Luce also selected Edward Kramer Thompson, a stringer for Time, as assistant picture editor in 1937. From 1949 to 1961, Thompson was the managing editor, and served as editor-in-chief for nearly a decade until his retirement in 1970. His influence was significant during the magazine's heyday, which was roughly from 1936 until the mid-1960s. Thompson was known for the free rein he gave his editors, particularly a "trio of formidable and colorful women: Sally Kirkland, fashion editor; Mary Letherbee, movie editor; and Mary Hamman, modern living editor."Dora Jane Hamblin, That Was the 'Life', New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977, p. 161.
When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, Life covered the war closely. By 1944, seven of the 40 Time and Life war correspondents were women: Americans Mary Welsh Hemingway, Margaret Bourke-White, Lael Tucker, Peggy Durdin, Shelley Smith Mydans, and Annalee Jacoby, as well as Englishwoman Jacqueline Saix (Saix's name is often omitted from the list, but she and Welsh were the only women listed as part of the magazine's team in a Times publisher's letter from May 8, 1944).
Life backed the war effort each week. In July 1942, it launched its first art contest for soldiers, which drew more than 1,500 entries submitted by all ranks. Judges sorted out the best and awarded $1,000 in prizes. Life picked 16 for reproduction in the magazine. The National Gallery in Washington, D.C. agreed to put 117 entries on exhibition that summer. Life, also supported the military's efforts to use artists to document the war. When Congress forbade the armed forces from using government money to fund artists in the field, Life privatized the programs, hiring many of the artists being let go by the Department of War (which would later become the Department of Defense). On December 7, 1960, Life managers donated many of the works by such artists to the Department of War and its art programs, such as the United States Army Art Program.
Each week during World War II, the magazine brought photographs of the war to Americans, with photographers from all theaters of war. The magazine was imitated in enemy propaganda using contrasting images of Life and Death.
In August 1942, writing about labor and racial unrest in Detroit, Life warned that "the morale situation is perhaps the worst in the U.S. ... It is time for the rest of the country to sit up and take notice. For Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S." Mayor Edward Jeffries was outraged: "I'll match Detroit's patriotism against any other city's in the country. The whole story in Life is scurrilous ... I'd just call it a yellow magazine and let it go at that."Mansfield (Ohio) News Journal, August 17, 1942. The article was considered so dangerous to the war effort that it was censored from copies of the magazine sold outside North America.
In July 1943, the magazine hired war photographer Robert Capa to cover the Sicilian and Italian campaigns. A veteran of Collier's magazine, Capa accompanied the first wave of the D-Day invasion in Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, and returned with only a handful of images, many of them out of focus. The magazine wrote in the captions that the photos were fuzzy because Capa's hands were shaking. Capa denied this and claimed that the darkroom had ruined his negatives. Later he poked fun at Life by titling his war memoir Slightly Out of Focus (1947). In 1954, Capa was killed after stepping on a landmine while covering the First Indochina War. Life photographer Bob Landry also went in with the first wave at D-Day, "but all of Landry's film was lost, and his shoes to boot."The Great Life Photographers, Thames and Hudson, paperback ed. 2009, , p. 294
A notable mistake appeared in Life's 1 November 1948 issue, the day before the U.S. presidential election, when the magazine printed a full-page photograph showing candidate Thomas E. Dewey and his wife riding across the harbor of San Francisco, California with the caption "The next President travels by ferry boat over the broad waters of San Francisco Bay.""Campaign Windup," LIFE (magazine), 1 November 1948 (scroll down to page 37). Retrieved 25 February 2026. Incumbent President Harry S. Truman won the election;Abels, Jules, Out of the Jaws of Victory, New York: Henry Holt and Company (1959), p. 261. Dewey was expected to win the election, and the Chicago Tribune made a similar mistake with the erroneous headline "Dewey Defeats Truman".
On May 10, 1950, the council of ministers in Cairo banned Life from Egypt forever. All issues on sale were confiscated. No reason was given, but Egyptian officials expressed indignation over the magazine's April 10 story about King Farouk of Egypt, entitled the "Problem King of Egypt". The government considered it insulting to the country.
In the 1950s, Life earned a measure of respect by commissioning work from top authors. After its publication of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, the magazine contracted with the author for a 4,000-word piece on bullfighting. Hemingway sent the editors a 10,000-word article, following his last visit to Spain to cover a series of contests between two top matadors in 1959. The article was republished in 1985 as the novella The Dangerous Summer.Michael Palin, "Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure", PBS, 1999.
In February 1953, just a few weeks after leaving office, President Harry S. Truman announced that Life magazine would handle all rights to his memoirs. Truman said it was his belief that by 1954 he would be able to speak more fully on subjects pertaining to the role his administration played in world affairs. Truman observed that Life editors had presented other memoirs with great dignity; he added that Life had also made the best offer.
Beginning in 1953, a Spanish-language edition was published, titled Life en español. It had a circulation of over 300,000 in Latin America.
For his 1955 Museum of Modern Art traveling exhibition The Family of Man, which was to be seen by nine million visitors worldwide, curator Edward Steichen relied heavily on photographs from Life: 111 of the 503 pictures shown, constituting more than 20% as counted by Abigail Solomon-Godeau. His assistant Wayne Miller entered the magazine's archive in late 1953, and spent an estimated nine months there. He searched through 3.5 million images, most in the form of original negatives (only in the last years of the war did the picture department start to print contact sheets of all assignments), and submitted many that had not been published in the magazine to Steichen for selection.
In November 1954, actress Dorothy Dandridge became the first African-American woman to be featured on the cover of the magazine.
In 1957, R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president at J. P. Morgan, published an article in Life extolling the virtues of magic mushrooms. This prompted Albert Hofmann to isolate psilocybin in 1958 for distribution by Sandoz alongside LSD in the U.S., further raising interest in LSD in the mass media. Following Wasson's report, Timothy Leary visited Mexico to try out the mushrooms, which were used in traditional religious rituals.
Lifes motto became "To see Life; to see the world." The magazine produced many popular science serials, such as The World We Live In and The Epic of Man in the early 1950s. The magazine continued to showcase the work of notable illustrators such as Alton S. Tobey, whose contributions included the cover for a 1958 series of articles on the history of the Russian Revolution.
As the 1950s drew to a close and television became more popular, the magazine was losing readers. In May 1959, Life announced plans to reduce its regular news-stand price from 25 cents a copy to 20. With the increase in television sales and viewership, interest in news magazines was waning, and Life had to try to create a new form.