Larger Than Life

“There’s something called the big time… but you may have already missed it.” --Daniel Longwell to Judy Haas, 1958 Daniel Longwell, formerly of New York, retired editor of LIFE Magazine was just climbing out of my brand new black, highly polished, 1957 Ford Thunderbird, complete with Continental Kit. Dan Longwell sensed that college bound, Judy Haas from three doors down the hill had no idea what was the ‘Big Time’. How could she? This was Neosho, Missouri, barely more than a village in the foothills of the Ozarks. Now at seventy instead of seventeen, I know what Dan Longwell was saying. He was thinking that the world in which he and his wife, Mary Douglas Fraser Longwell, had worked was probably gone. It must have been a sad epiphany because the Longwells had lived an historical life among historical people. In fact, their lives had the advantage of being at the top of America’s literary, art and journalism worlds. The Longwells’ friends were people whose books line our libraries and whose paintings hang in our museums. During Dan’s fifteen years at Doubleday publishing headquarters in Garden City, New York, he brought forth the classic American historical fictions writers of the early part of the twentieth century including Edna Ferber, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Sinclair Lewis. His best friends were the likes of Nelson Doubleday, Sr., Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and Ogden Nash. He was mentored by Christopher Morley about all things bookshop and he credited Frank Nelson Doubleday and Alfred Knopf for teaching him about the publishing of books. By the time Longwell left Doubleday for Time Inc., he had fifteen full years of experience in publishing, promotion, and a corps of literary writers and book illustrators who had become his personal friends. In the world of publishing in the 1930’s, his knowledge was encyclopedic. ...Daniel Longwell’s intellectual prowess and his personable devotion to working authors had established him as Doubleday Publishers’ “Young Man.” After fifteen strong years with Doubleday, in 1934, he resigned from the world of book publishing to join Henry Robinson Luce at Time Inc and to try his hand at the new profession, “journalism” publishing. ... As is often stated, “It is not what you know, but whom you know.” Henry Luce, reigning chief of Time Inc. with TIME and FORTUNE magazines, had been trying to recruit Daniel Longwell away from Doubleday for a number of years. Luce was a magazine magnate and Longwell was a books man. Luce was not interested in books, but he wanted Longwell’s brains which at this point after Longwell’s return from England had a certain cache. In Longwell’s case the “what” and the “who” came hand in hand. The questions before him became: Do you want to be in the book business or the magazine business? Do you want to advance literature or journalism? Longwell knew a lot about books. But he was dreaming about journalism. And, in fact, he finally merged the two. Thus it was this Midwesterner from Omaha, Nebraska, took his chair and whip into the lion’s cage of Time Inc. journalism!