The First Issue
March 3, 1923
By Nancy Gibbs
enry Luce and Briton Hadden and their scrappy team of 20-somethings piled into a cab to barrel across town to the printing plant on the last Tuesday in February 1923. There they spent the final hours cutting, pasting, and fine-tuning the first issue of the magazine that would come to define the American Century. It was a skinny issue, stripped-down stories slotted into 22 sections, designed for an age of information overload, to be read in an hour—its unique value proposition signaled in its very name.
