Venerable Institution.

When the Saturday Evening Post ceased publication with the 8 February 1969 issue, one of the most venerable institutions of American magazine publishing fell victim to the changing media landscape of the post-World War II era.

Middle-class America.

The Saturday Evening Post claimed ancestry from the 1729 founding by Benjamin Franklin of the Pennsylvania Gazette. The Saturday Evening Post was, for almost sixty years, the most successful general-interest weekly magazine in the United States. The magazine had first reached its position as a magazine leader under the editorship of George Horace Lorimer, who held that post from 1899 until 1937. During Lorimer's tenure the Saturday Evening Post published fiction by Harold Frederic, Ring Lardner, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Stephen Crane, Thomas Wolfe, James Branch Cabell, P. G. Wodehouse, Rudyard Kipling, William Dean Howells, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The mix of quality...