The Saturday Evening Post

1903 cover of The Saturday Evening Post: Otto von Bismarck illustrated by George Gibbs
Bimonthly
Publisher	Curtis Publishing Company
Total circulation (2010)	352,930
First issue	1821
Company	Saturday Evening Post Society
Country	United States
Based in	Indianapolis, Indiana
Language	English
Website	saturdayeveningpost.com
ISSN	0048-9239

The Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1969, and quarterly and then bimonthly from 1971.

History[link]

While the publication traces its historical roots to Benjamin Franklin, The Pennsylvania Gazette was first published in 1728 by Samuel Keimer. The following year (1729), Franklin acquired the Gazette from Keimer for a small sum and turned it into the largest circulation newspaper in all the colonies. It continued publication until 1815. The Saturday Evening Post was founded in 1821^[1] and grew to become the most widely circulated weekly magazine in America. The magazine gained prominent status under the leadership of its longtime editor George Horace Lorimer (1899–1937).^[2]

The Saturday Evening Post published current event articles, editorials, human interest pieces, humor, illustrations, a letter column, poetry (with contributions submitted by readers), single-panel gag cartoons (including Hazel by Ted Key) and stories by the leading writers of the time. It was known for commissioning lavish illustrations and original works of fiction. Illustrations were featured on the cover and embedded in stories and advertising. Some Post illustrations became popular and continue to be reproduced as posters or prints, especially those by Norman Rockwell.

Curtis Publishing Co. stopped publishing the Post in 1969 after the company lost a landmark defamation suit and was ordered to pay over $3 million in damages. The Post was revived in 1971 as a quarterly publication. As of the late 2000s, the Saturday Evening Post magazine is published six times a year by the "Saturday Evening Post Society", which purchased the magazine in 1982.

Illustration[link]

A Norman Rockwell Post cover illustration from January 1922

In 1916, Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer discovered Norman Rockwell, then an unknown 22-year-old New York artist. Lorimer promptly purchased two illustrations from Rockwell, using them as covers, and commissioned three more drawings. Rockwell's illustrations of the American family and rural life of a bygone era became icons. During his 50-year career with the Post, Rockwell painted more than 300 covers.

The Post also employed Nebraska artist John Philip Falter, who became known "as a painter of Americana with an accent of the Middle West," who "brought out some of the homeliness and humor of Middle Western town life and home life." He produced 120 covers for the Post between 1943 and 1968, ceasing only when the magazine began displaying photographs on its covers. Other popular cover illustrators include the artists John Clymer, W. H. D. Koerner, J. C. Leyendecker, Charles Archibald MacLellan, John E. Sheridan, and N.C. Wyeth.

The magazine's line-up of cartoonists included Bob Barnes, Irwin Caplan, Tom Henderson, Al Johns, Clyde Lamb, Jerry Marcus, Frank O'Neal, B. Tobey, Pete Wyma and Bill Yates. The magazine ran Ted Key's cartoon panel series Hazel from 1943 to 1969.

Content[link]

Each issue featured several original short stories and often included an installment of a serial appearing in successive issues. Most of the fiction was written for mainstream tastes by popular writers, but some literary writers were featured. The opening pages of stories featured paintings by the leading magazine illustrators. The Post published stories and essays by H. E. Bates, Ray Bradbury, Kay Boyle, Agatha Christie, Brian Cleeve, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, C. S. Forester, Ernest Haycox, Robert A. Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Gallico, Normand Poirier, Hammond Innes, Louis L'Amour, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph C. Lincoln, John P. Marquand, Edgar Allan Poe, Sax Rohmer, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck and Rex Stout and Rob Wagner. It also published poetry by such noted poets as Carl Sandburg, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and Hannah Kahn.

Jack London's best known novel The Call of the Wild was first published, in serialized form, in the Saturday Evening Post in 1903.^[3]

Emblematic of the Post's fiction was author Clarence Budington Kelland, who first appeared in 1916-17 with stories of homespun heroes, Efficiency Edgar and Scattergood Baines. Kelland was a steady presence from 1922 until 1961.

For many years William Hazlett Upson contributed a very popular series of short stories about the escapades of Earthworm Tractors salesman Alexander Botts. Publication in the Post launched careers and helped established artists and writers stay afloat. P. G. Wodehouse said "the wolf was always at the door" until the Post gave him his "first break" in 1915 by serializing Something New.^[4]

After the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Post columnist Garet Garrett became a vocal critic of the New Deal. Garrett accused the Roosevelt administration of initiating socialist strategies. After Lorimer died, Garrett became editorial writer-in-chief and criticized the Roosevelt administration's support of the United Kingdom and efforts to prepare to enter what became the Second World War. Garrett's positions aroused controversy and may have cost the Post readers and advertisers.

Decline and demise[link]

The Post readership began to decline in the late 1950s and 1960s. In general, the decline of general interest magazines was blamed on television, which competed for advertisers and readers' attention. The Post had problems retaining readers: The public's taste in fiction was changing, and the Post 's conservative politics and values remained controversial. Content by popular writers became harder to obtain. Prominent authors drifted away to newer magazines offering more money and status. As a result, the Post published more articles on current events and cut costs by replacing illustrations with photographs for covers and advertisements.

The magazine's publisher, Curtis Publishing Company, lost a landmark defamation suit, Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts 388 U.S. 130 (1967),^[5] resulting from an article, and was ordered to pay $3,060,000 in damages to the plaintiff. The Post article implied that football coaches Paul "Bear" Bryant and Wally Butts conspired to fix a game between the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia. Butts sued Curtis Publishing Co. for defamation. The case went to the Supreme Court, which held that libel damages may be recoverable (in this instance against a news organization) if the injured party is a non-public official. But the plaintiff must prove that the defendant was guilty of a reckless lack of professional standards when examining allegations for reasonable credibility.

William Emerson was promoted to editor-in-chief in 1965 and remained in the position until the magazine's demise in 1969.^[6]

In 1968, Martin Ackerman, a specialist in troubled firms, became president of Curtis after lending it $5 million. Although at first he said there were no plans to shut down the magazine, he halved its circulation in an attempt to increase the quality of the audience, and then shut it down.^[7] In announcing that the February 8, 1969, issue would be the magazine's last, Curtis executive Martin Ackerman stated that the magazine had lost $5 million in 1968 and would lose a projected $3 million in 1969.^[8] In a meeting with employees after the magazine's closure had been announced, Emerson thanked the staff for their professional work and promised "to stay here and see that everyone finds a job".^[9]

At a March 1969 postmortem on the magazine's closing, Emerson stated that The Post "was a damn good vehicle for advertising" with competitive renewal rates and readership reports and expressed what The New York Times called "understandable bitterness" in wishing "that all the one-eyed critics will lose their other eye".^[10] Otto Friedrich, the magazine's last managing editor, blamed the death of The Post on Curtis. In his Decline and Fall (Harper & Row, 1970), an account of the magazine's final years (1962–69), he argued that corporate management was unimaginative and incompetent. Friedrich acknowledges that The Post faced challenges as the tastes of American readers changed over the course of the 1960s, but he insisted that the magazine maintained a standard of good quality and was appreciated by readers.

Reemergence and current ownership[link]

In 1970, control of the debilitated Curtis Publishing Company was acquired from the estate of Cyrus Curtis by Indianapolis industrialist Beurt SerVaas.^[11] SerVass relaunched the Post the following year on a quarterly basis as a kind of nostalgia magazine.^[12]

In early 1982, ownership of the Post was transferred to the Benjamin Franklin Literary and Medical Society, founded in 1976 by the Post's then-editor, Dr. Corena "Cory" SerVaas^[13] (wife of Beurt SerVaas).^[14] The magazine's core focus was now health and medicine; indeed, the magazine's website originally noted that the "credibility of The Saturday Evening Post has made it a valuable asset for reaching medical consumers and for helping medical researchers obtain family histories. In the magazine, national health surveys are taken to further current research on topics such as cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcerative colitis, spina bifida, and bipolar disorder."^[15] Ownership of the magazine was later transferred to the Saturday Evening Post Society; Dr. SerVaas headed both organizations. The range of topics covered in the magazine's articles is now wide, suitable for a general readership.

By 1991, Curtis Publishing Company had been renamed Curtis International, a subsidiary of SerVaas Inc., and had become an importer of audiovisual equipment.^[16] Today the Post is published six times a year by the Saturday Evening Post Society, which claims 501(c)(3) non-profit organization status.

Editors[link]

(from the purchase by Curtis, 1898)^[17]

• William George Jordan (1898–1899)
• George Horace Lorimer (1899–1937)
• Wesley Winans Stout (1937–1942)
• Ben Hibbs (1942–1962)
• Robert Fuoss (1962)
• Robert Sherrod (1962)
• Clay Blair, Jr. (1962–1964)
• William Emerson (1965–1969)
• Beurt SerVaas (1971–1975)
• Cory SerVaas, M.D. (1975–2008)
• Joan SerVaas (2008–2009)
• Patrick Perry (2009)^[18]
• Stephen C. George (2009–2010)
• Steven Slon (2012–present)^[19][20]

Cover gallery[link]

• 1905-05-20 Saturday Evening Post.jpg

  May 20, 1905. Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth

• 

  December 28, 1907. Cover by J. C. Leyendecker

• SatrudayEveningPost041610.jpg

  April 16, 1910. Cover by Anton Otto Fischer

• 1920-12-04-Saturday-Evening-Post-Norman-Rockwell-cover-Santa-and-Expense-Book-no-logo-400-Digimarc.jpg

  December 4, 1920 Cover by Norman Rockwell

• No-swimming-by-norman-rockwell.jpg

  June 4, 1921. Cover by Norman Rockwell

See also[link]

• Cyrus Curtis
• John Philip Falter
• Anton Otto Fischer
• Garet Garrett
• Ladies' Home Journal
• J. C. Leyendecker
• Norman Rockwell
• John E. Sheridan (illustrator)
• Harry Simmons
• Edmund Ward

Similar magazines[link]

• Collier's Weekly
• Liberty
• Life
• Look
• Reader's Digest

References[link]

External links[link]

• Saturday Evening Post Society – Current Publisher of the Saturday Evening Post Magazine and saturdayeveningpost.com
• Saturday Evening Post illustration archive 1923–1975
• George Horace Lorimer
• More Irrelevant Than Irreverent Pete Hamill for the Village Voice January 16, 1969

Evening Post may refer to:

Newspapers

• Bristol Evening Post
• Evening Post, Charleston; now The Post and Courier
• New Evening Post (Hong Kong)
• Jersey Evening Post
• Lancashire Evening Post
• London Evening Post
• Evening Post (London) (not to be confused with the London Evening Post)
• Berington's Evening Post
• Nottingham Evening Post
• New York Evening Post
• The Evening Post (New Zealand)
• Aftenposten (Norway)
• Reading Evening Post
• Regina Evening Post
• Shanghai Evening Post
• South Wales Evening Post
• Wigan Evening Post
• Yangtse Evening Post
• Yorkshire Evening Post

Other

• Evening Post Publishing Company, South Carolina
• The Saturday Evening Post, American magazine

See also[link]

• The Post (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Norman Rockwell
Birth name	Norman Percevel Rockwell
Born	(1894-02-03)February 3, 1894 New York City
Died	November 8, 1978(1978-11-08) (aged 84) Stockbridge, Massachusetts
Nationality	American
Field	Painting, illustrator
Training	National Academy of Design Art Students League
Works	Willie Gillis Saying Grace Four Freedoms
Influenced	Alex Ross[1]

Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine for more than four decades.^[2] Among the best-known of Rockwell's works are the Willie Gillis series, Rosie the Riveter (although his Rosie was reproduced less than others of the day), Saying Grace (1951), The Problem We All Live With, and the Four Freedoms series. He is also noted for his work for the Boy Scouts of America (BSA); producing covers for their publication Boys' Life, calendars, other illustrations, and for his covers on the Saturday Evening Post, a magazine edited by George Horace Lorimer.

Body of work[link]

His first Scouting calendar (1925)

Norman Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing over 4,000 original works in his lifetime. Most of his works are either in public collections, or have been destroyed in fire or other misfortunes. Rockwell was also commissioned to illustrate over 40 books including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. His annual contributions for the Boy Scouts' calendars between 1925 and 1976 (Rockwell was a 1939 recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America^[3]), were only slightly overshadowed by his most popular of calendar works: the "Four Seasons" illustrations for Brown & Bigelow that were published for 17 years beginning in 1947 and reproduced in various styles and sizes since 1964. Illustrations for booklets, catalogs, posters (particularly movie promotions), sheet music, stamps, playing cards, and murals (including "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "God Bless the Hills", which was completed in 1936 for the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey) rounded out Rockwell's œuvre as an illustrator.

In 1969, as a tribute to Rockwell's 75th year birthday, officials of Brown & Bigelow and the Boy Scouts of America asked Rockwell to pose in Beyond the Easel, the calendar illustration that year.^[4]

Rockwell's work was dismissed by serious art critics in his lifetime.^[5] Many of his works appear overly sweet in modern critics' eyes,^[6] especially the Saturday Evening Post covers, which tend toward idealistic or sentimentalized portrayals of American life— this has led to the often-deprecatory adjective "Rockwellesque." Consequently, Rockwell is not considered a "serious painter" by some contemporary artists, who often regard his work as bourgeois and kitsch. Writer Vladimir Nabokov sneered that Rockwell's brilliant technique was put to "banal" use, and wrote in his book Pnin: "That Dalí is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by Gypsies in babyhood". He is called an "illustrator" instead of an artist by some critics, a designation he did not mind, as it was what he called himself.^[7]

However, in his later years, Rockwell began receiving more attention as a painter when he chose more serious subjects such as the series on racism for Look magazine.^[8] One example of this more serious work is The Problem We All Live With, which dealt with the issue of school racial integration. The painting depicts a young African American girl, Ruby Bridges, flanked by white federal marshals, walking to school past a wall defaced by racist graffiti.^[9]

In 1999, The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl said of Rockwell in ArtNews: “Rockwell is terrific. It’s become too tedious to pretend he isn’t.”^[5]

Rockwell's work was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2001.^[10] Rockwell's Breaking Home Ties sold for $15.4 million at a 2006 Sotheby’s auction.^[5] A twelve-city U.S. tour of Rockwell's works took place in 2008.^[11]

Influence[link]

Cover of October 1920 issue of Popular Science magazine

• In the film Empire of the Sun, a young boy (played by Christian Bale), is put to bed by his loving parents in a scene also inspired by a Rockwell painting—a reproduction of which is later kept by the young boy during his captivity in a prison camp. (Freedom from Fear, 1943).^[12]
• The 1994 film Forrest Gump includes a shot in a school that re-creates Rockwell's Girl with Black Eye with young Forrest in place of the girl. Much of the film drew heavy visual inspiration from Rockwell's art.^[13]
• Film director George Lucas owns Rockwell's original of The Peach Crop, and his colleague Steven Spielberg owns a sketch of Rockwell's Triple Self-Portrait. Each of the artworks hangs in the respective filmmakers' workspaces.^[5] Rockwell is a major character in an episode of Lucas’ Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, “Passion for Life.”
• In 2005, Target Co. sold Marshall Field's to Federated Department Stores and the Federated discovered a reproduction of Rockwell's The Clock Mender, which depicted the great clocks of the Marshall Field and Company Building on display.^[14][15] Rockwell had donated the painting depicted on the cover of the November 3, 1945 Saturday Evening Post to the store in 1948.^[16]
• On Norman Rockwell's birthday, February 3, 2010, Google featured Rockwell's iconic image of young love "Boy and Girl Gazing at the Moon" which is also known as "Puppy Love" on its home page. The response was so great that day that the Norman Rockwell museum's servers went down under the onslaught.^{[citation needed]}
• "Dreamland," a track from Canadian alternative rock band Our Lady Peace's 2009 album Burn Burn, was inspired by Rockwell's paintings.^[17]

Major works[link]

• Scout at Ship's Wheel (first published magazine cover illustration, Boys' Life, September 1913)
• Santa and Scouts in Snow (1913)
• Boy and Baby Carriage (1916; first Saturday Evening Post cover)
• Circus Barker and Strongman (1916)
• Gramps at the Plate (1916)
• Redhead Loves Hatty Perkins (1916)
• People in a Theatre Balcony (1916)
• Tain't You (1917; first Life magazine cover)
• Cousin Reginald Goes to the Country (1917; first Country Gentleman cover)
• Santa and Expense Book (1920)
• Mother Tucking Children into Bed (1921; first wife Irene is the model)

• No Swimming (1921)
• Santa with Elves (1922)
• Doctor and Doll (1929)
• Deadline (1938)
• The Four Freedoms (1943)
  • Freedom of Speech (1943)
  • Freedom of Worship (1943)
  • Freedom from Want (1943)
  • Freedom from Fear (1943)
• Rosie the Riveter (1943)^[18]
• Going and Coming (1947)
• Bottom of the Sixth (or The Three Umpires; 1949)
• Saying Grace (1951)
• The Young Lady with the Shiner (1953)
• Girl at Mirror (1954)
• Breaking Home Ties (1954)^[19]
• The Marriage License (1955)
• The Scoutmaster (1956)^[20]
• The Runaway (1958)
• A Family Tree (1959)
• Triple Self-Portrait (1960)
• Golden Rule (1961)
• The Problem We All Live With (1964)
• Southern Justice (Murder in Mississippi) (1965)^[21]
• New Kids in the Neighborhood (1967)
• Russian Schoolroom (1967)
• The Rookie
• Spirit of 76 (1976) (stolen in 1978 but recovered in 2001 by the FBI's Robert King Wittman)

Gallery[link]

• 
• Freedom of Worship.jpg
• Freedom From Fear painting.JPG
• No-swimming-by-norman-rockwell.jpg

Other collections[link]

• Norman Rockwell WWII posters, hosted by the University of North Texas Libraries Digital Collections
• Rockwell Collection at the National Museum of American Illustration

See also[link]

	World War I portal
	Scouting portal

• James K. Van Brunt, a frequent model for Rockwell
• Norman Rockwell's World... An American Dream, a 1972 short documentary film

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Buechner, Thomas S (1992). The Norman Rockwell Treasury. Galahad. ISBN 0-88365-411-3. 
• Finch, Christopher (1990). Norman Rockwell: 332 Magazine Covers. Abbeville Publishing Group. ISBN 0-89660-000-9. 
• Christopher, Finch (1985). Norman Rockwell's America. Harry N. Abrams, Inc.. ISBN 0-8109-8071-1. 
• Gherman, Beverly (2000). Norman Rockwell: Storyteller with a Brush. ISBN 0-689-82001-1. 
• Hennessey, Maureen Hart; Larson, Judy L. (1999). Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People. Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-6392-2. 
• Rockwell, Tom (2005). Best of Norman Rockwell. Courage Books. ISBN 0-7624-2415-X. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Norman Rockwell

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Norman Rockwell

• Booknotes interview with Laura Claridge on Norman Rockwell: A Life, December 2, 2001.
• Gallery of classic graphic design featuring the illustrations of Norman Rockwell.
• The Image Library of signed and numbered Norman Rockwell prints
• Art Directors Club biography, portrait and images of work
• Norman Rockwell at Find a Grave
• Footage of Norman Rockwell sketching a couple
• America, Illustrated – by The New York Times
• Norman Rockwell: Once upon a time there Was the American Dream by Tiziano Thomas Dossena, Bridge Puglia USA, April 2011