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Life is an American magazine that publishes interviews, essays, cartoons, and photos. At one point it sold more than 13.5 million copies a week; today Life is distributed as a free supplement in major U.S. newspapers. more...

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It was born in the early 1880s as a humor magazine and sold well during the late 1930s. In the years following World War II, Life was so popular that President Harry S. Truman, Sir Winston Churchill, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur all serialized their memoirs in its pages.

Life was the first all-photography U.S. news magazine and dominated the market for more than forty years. Perhaps one of the best-known pictures printed in the magazine was Alfred Eisenstaedt’s shot of a nurse in a sailor’s arms, snapped on August 27, 1945, as they celebrated Victory Over Japan Day in New York City. The magazine’s place in the history of photojournalism is considered its most important contribution to publishing.

However, Life did not always have its familiar white type on red field logo. Beginning in 1883 and continuing for 53 years, Life was a general-interest light entertainment magazine, heavy on illustrations, jokes, and social commentary. It attracted some of the greatest writers, editors, and cartoonists of its era. In 1936 it was bought by Henry Luce, publisher of Fortune and Time, and transformed into a news picture magazine. It was wildly successful for two generations before its prestige was diminished by economics and changing tastes. Since 1972, Life has ceased publication twice, only to be brought back to readers in different incarnations.

Early history

Life was born January 4, 1883, in a New York City artist’s studio at 1155 Broadway. The founding publisher was John Ames Mitchell, a 37-year old illustrator, who used a $10,000 inheritance to launch the weekly magazine. Mitchell created the first Life nameplate with cupids as mascots; he later drew its masthead of a knight leveling his lance at the posterior of a fleeing devil. Mitchell took advantage of a revolutionary new printing process using zinc-coated plates, which improved the reproduction of his illustrations and artwork. This edge helped because Life faced stiff competition from the bestselling humor magazines The Judge and Puck, which were already established and successful. Edward Sandford Martin was brought on as Life’s first literary editor; the recent Harvard graduate was a founder of the Harvard Lampoon.

The motto of the first issue of Life was “While there’s Life, there’s hope.” The new magazine set forth its principles and policies to its readers: “We wish to have some fun in this paper... We shall try to domesticate as much as possible of the casual cheerfulness that is drifting about in an unfriendly world... We shall have something to say about religion, about politics, fashion, society, literature, the stage, the stock exchange, and the police station, and we will speak out what is in our mind as fairly, as truthfully, and as decently as we know how.”

Read more at Wikipedia.org