The Author as a Brand Name: American Literary Figures and the Time Cover Story

Abstract

When Time magazine profiled him in March 1964, John Cheever wrote an entry in his journal which imagined his daughter Susan's thoughts:After they put Daddy's picture on the cover of Time, he seemed to lose something… I don't mean like Dorian Gray or anything but like a savage who thinks that if he is photographed he will have lost part of his image. A man came up to the house … and painted a picture of Daddy. It was painted in a definite style, a magazine cover style, and Daddy seemed to get himself mixed up with all the kings and presidents and so forth who had been on the cover before him. I mean he seemed in some way locked into the cover, fixed there, impressed on the paper. Once I lost my temper at him and said I don't think anybody's impressed by the fact that you had your face on Time magazine … They have all kinds of people; broken down ball players and crooks. It hurt his feelings, you could see.Cheever's words give some suggestion both of the importance authors attached to the Time cover story, which at the peak of the magazine's influence was widely perceived as the apotheosis of American fame, and of their confusion over what it actually signified. This essay aims to explore this ambivalence by investigating the ways in which Time featured novelists, poets and playwrights as the subjects of its cover stories in the period from the magazine's first issue in 1923 to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it began to lose some of its status as “the National Poet Laureate.” Time owed this status to its position as champion of the “middlebrow,” being designed “for the lady from Dubuque … and for the President of the United States” and combining commercial success with semi-institutional legitimacy.