As editor of the Saturday Evening Post from 1899 to 1936 George Horace Lorimer built that publication into the most widely read magazine of the period. He infused the Post with the Puritan ethic of hard work and a sense of the American Dream, and under his leadership it became an icon of American middle-class values and thus earned a broad base of readership loyalty and advertising support.

Lorimer was born 6 October 1867 in Louisville, Kentucky. He was the fourth and youngest child as well as the only son of George Claude and Arabella Burford Lorimer. His father, then twenty-nine, was an evangelical Baptist minister who had come to the United States from his native Scotland in 1856. The elder Lorimer was a successful minister who devoted his energies to increasing church membership and eliminating his church's debts. As a result of his father's growing prominence, Lorimer lived in four cities before...