Briton Hadden: A Biography of the Co-founder of TIME

By Noel F. Busch

Written by a first cousin, and one of the original staffers on Time magazine, this is the biography of the man who with Henry Luce was responsible for founding Time in 1923.

Busch records Hadden’s short life story, from his premature birth in 1898 to his pre-mature death in 1929, seven years after the inauguration of the magazine. From his early writing and editorial activities at Hotchkiss boarding school – where he was a classmate and competitor of Henry Lucy, to his time at Yale, where the two became collaborators and decided to edit a magazine.

In 1921, they started a news-focused weekly and battled through the first uncertain years of what could be; of raising the high finance to match their high faith. And as Luce developed a public, Hadden worked on the famous idiom and character of the magazine.

To date, Time has the world’s largest circulation for a weekly news magazine.

Noel Fairchild Busch, 1906-1985 was an author and Life magazine correspondent who reported extensively on World War II and its aftermath. He was born in Manhattan and began his association with the Time-Life publications in 1927 when he left Princeton University in his junior year. He joined Time magazine as an associate editor at the invitation of his cousin, Briton Hadden, who with Henry R. Luce had founded Time in 1923.