George Horace Lorimer

At the turn of the twentieth century, few American editors had a hand as visible as George Horace Lorimer’s. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, on October 6, 1867, and later educated at Moseley High School in Chicago and Yale University, Lorimer came to publishing by a route that ran through business, failure, reporting, and study. He would become best known as the longtime editor of The Saturday Evening Post, guiding it from 1899 to 1936 and helping turn a magazine with circulation of several thousand into one read by more than a million.

Lorimer’s early life gave him a close view of practical ambition. He was the son of Rev. George C. Lorimer and Belle Burford Lorimer, and while at Yale he was persuaded by one of his father’s parishioners, Philip D. Armour, to leave school for the meatpacking business in Chicago. From 1887 to 1895 he worked in that world, and he also opened a grocery business of his own, which failed. In 1892, he married Alma Ennis. He later moved to Boston, worked as a reporter, and returned to school at Colby College to study writing. Those years supplied him with more than a résumé. They gave him material: commerce, discipline, setbacks, and the sharp, plainspoken habits of working life.

After newspaper work at the Boston Post and the Boston Herald, Lorimer was hired in 1897 by Cyrus H. K. Curtis as literary editor of The Saturday Evening Post. In March 1899 he was promoted to acting editor, replacing William George Jordan, and he became editor-in-chief. Under his direction, the magazine published work by Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, and Frank Norris. He also introduced American readers to European writers such as Joseph Conrad and John Galsworthy, and persuaded former U.S. President Grover Cleveland to write for the magazine.

Lorimer’s eye was not limited to prose. In 1916 he hired the then unknown Norman Rockwell to create cover artwork for The Saturday Evening Post, a decision that helped shape the magazine’s public face. Lorimer also wrote one of its most popular series himself, anonymously: Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to his Son, published from 1901 to 1902. Framed as letters from John Graham, a self-made pork packer, to his Harvard-enrolled son Pierrepont, the series drew more than 5,000 letters from readers. It was published as a book in 1902 and became a best seller in the United States and overseas, followed by Old Gorgon Graham: More Letters From a Self-Made Merchant to His Son in 1903. The first book later became the basis for the 1922 film A Self-made Man, starring William Russell.

In 1932, Lorimer became president of the Curtis Publishing Company and remained in charge until the last day of 1936. He died of throat cancer on October 22, 1937, in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, and was interred at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. President Herbert Hoover served as a pallbearer at his funeral. Lorimer’s words still fit the world that shaped him: energetic, unsentimental, fond of work, and alert to character. “You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction,” he wrote, a line that sounds as if it came straight from the editor’s desk and the business floor alike.