George
Horace Lorimer was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1868. He worked
in a meat-packing company and as a retail grocer before turning to
reporting.
In 1899 Cyrus H. Curtis, the owner of the Saturday
Evening Post hired Lorimer as literary editor. Curtis was
so impressed with Lorimer that within a few months he had become editor-in-chief.
Curtis gave Lorimer total control over running the Saturday
Evening Post. On one occasion Curtis told Lorimer that his
wife did not like like an article that was in the journal. Lorimer
replied that "I'm not editing the Post for your wife."
Curtis made no further comment and soon afterwards increased Lorimer's
salary to $250 a week.
Lorimer commissioned top journalist such as Frank
Norris, David Graham Phillips,
Willa Cather, Jack
London, and William Stead to write articles
for the journal. In 1903 the Saturday
Evening Post spent $700 for the rights to publish London's
Call of the Wild. Other writers whose stories appeared at this
time included Rudyard Kipling, Theodore
Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, G.
K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, Arnold
Bennett, John Galsworthy, Gilbert
Parker and Stephen Crane.
Lorimer held conservative views and this was reflected in the articles
he published in the magazine. Upton Sinclair
wrote that the material in the Saturday
Evening Post was as "standardized as soda crackers;
originality is taboo, new ideas are treason, social sympathy a crime,
and the one virtue of man is to produce larger and larger quantities
of material things." However, Lorimer did employ the radical
David Graham Phillips, who wrote over
fifty articles criticizing the rich and power.
By December, 1908, Lorimer was able to announce in the Saturday
Evening Post that for the first time the journal was selling
over a million copies a week. Under Lorimer's stewardship circulation
continued to increase and by the end of 1913 had reached 2,000,000.
In March 1916 Lorimer agreed to meet Norman
Rockwell, a 22 year old artist from New York. When Lorimer saw
his work he immediately accepted two front covers he had produced
and commissioned three more. This was the start of his long-term relationship
with the magazine that was to last over 45 years.
The Saturday Evening Post continued
to grow in size. On 22nd November, 1919, the first 200 page issue
came out. This included 111 pages of advertising, a third of which
was for the car industry. Sales also increased and by the 1937 had
reached 3,000,000. George Horace Lorimer continued to edit the Saturday
Evening Post until a year before his death in 1937.
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