DeWitt Wallace (1889-1981), American publisher, was the founder of Reader's Digest, one of the world's largest-selling magazines.

DeWitt Wallace was born on November 12, 1889, in St. Paul, Minnesota, where his father was on the faculty (and later president) of Macalester College. DeWitt attended Macalester from 1907 to 1909 but, finding life there too confining, transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to St. Paul in 1912 and was hired by a publishing firm specializing in farming literature. Much of the company's information was provided without cost by federal and state agencies. Wallace compiled a list of the available public documents, added his own comments, and published the result in 1916 in a pamphlet entitled Getting the Most Out of Farming. Acting as his own salesman, Wallace sold nearly 100,000 copies, primarily to rural bankers who offered it to their customers as a promotional device.

When America entered World War I Wallace...