Though Lawrence Spivak is best known as the creator of NBC television's "Meet the Press," he made important contributions during the 1930s and 1940s to the American print media as well. Between 1933 and 1950 Spivak was business manager, publisher, and ultimately editor of what had been one of America's most controversial magazines: H. L. Mencken's American Mercury. Under Spivak's administration, the Mercury adopted more-conservative social and political perspectives, while it maintained its reputation for quality writing and incisive thought. To keep his financially ailing magazine afloat, Spivak developed the nation's first successful paperback publishing house in over a quarter century, American Mercury Books.

Lawrence Edmund Spivak was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 11 June 1900, the only son and second oldest of four children of William Benjamin and Sonya (Bershad) Spivak. Though his father was a prosperous manufacturer of nurses' uniforms and ladies' dresses, Lawrence entered the working world through...