Helen Rogers Reid was a small woman who made a large impact on the world of newspapers as advertising solicitor, manager, and president of the New York Tribune and the Herald Tribune. Her innovativeness and energy were a major influence in the development of current journalism, especially in the field of advertising.

Helen Rogers was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, on 23 November 1882, the youngest of eleven children of Benjamin Talbot Rogers, a merchant who died when she was three, and Sarah Johnson Rogers. The family maintained a modest standard of living after her father's death. From the age of eleven through sixteen Rogers studied at Grafton Hall, a boarding school in Fond du Lac, of which her brother, the Reverend Benjamin Talbot Rogers, was headmaster. After graduating from Grafton, she entered Barnard College in New York City in 1899. She intended to become a teacher of Greek, but changed her...