Bernarr Macfadden, with his maniacal dedication to diet and exercise, was perceived during his lifetime as either a clownish eccentric, a true visionary, or a social menace. All these perceptions helped give Physical Culture, True Story, and the many other magazines he published a combined circulation of over seven million by 1935. He is remembered, as well, for founding a sensational tabloid, the New York Evening Graphic, in 1924.

Macfadden, whose fortune was estimated at thirty million dollars in 1930, was born to a life of abject poverty on a farm near Mill Spring, Missouri, on 16 August 1868. He was named Bernard Adolphus McFadden. His alcoholic father, John R. McFadden, an unsuccessful farmer and breeder of racehorses, died when his son was four. His mother, Elizabeth Miller McFadden, died of tuberculosis when Bernard was ten, and the sickly youth was presumed headed for an early grave with the same disease. But, bound...