BRITON HADDEN
Co-founder

Briton Hadden, co-founder of TIME magazine, was born in Brooklyn on February 18, 1898.

His talent and zest for the field of journalism, editing in particular, emerged early on while a student at Hotchkiss School, a Connecticut preparatory school where he was editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. It was at Hotchkiss where Hadden and Henry Luce first met and fostered both a friendship and partnership founded on contrasting yet complimentary personalities. Luce was known as meticulous and conservative while Hadden was characterized as spontaneous and eccentric.

Hadden continued to develop his editorial skills at Yale University where he was elected to the Yale Daily News, America's oldest college daily newspaper, and later as chairman. Hadden and Luce, once again classmates, not only joined forces at the Daily News, but enlisted together in Yale's Reserve Officers Training Corps and the two became second lieutenants. As both journalists and soldiers, Hadden and Luce were struck by the misinformation they encountered surrounding World War I. It was during military training at Camp Jackson in South Carolina, that Luce and Hadden first discussed the need for a new kind of newspaper or magazine whose purpose would be to do away with such misinformation.

Hadden graduated from Yale in 1920, voted the "most likely to succeed." After graduation, Hadden joined the reporting staff of the New York World. In December 1921, he left New York to become a reporter for the Baltimore News, where he again found himself working alongside Luce. Rivals for front page stories by day, Hadden and Luce spent evenings developing their concept of the newsmagazine, with the ultimate goal of a weekly publication "aimed to serve the modern necessity of keeping people informed, created on a new principle of complete organization." They left the Baltimore News in 1922 and, having raised a total of $86,000 from 74 investors, they published the first issue of TIME, The Weekly Newsmagazine, on March 3, 1923. Hadden served as editor, Luce as business manager, with the two swapped the titles of president and secretary-treasurer annually. In April 1927, Hadden founded Tide, a monthly magazine for the advertising community (Tide was sold by Time Inc. in November 1930).

As editor of TIME from the first issue until 1928, Hadden wrote no stories of his own, as he felt that restricting himself solely to editing was the only way in which the members of his writing staff would learn their craft. He was renowned for his ability to stimulate others to write in his desired style. In explaining to a new writer what was wanted he would say things like: "Let all stories make sharp sense. Omit flowers. Remember you can't be too obvious." Hadden carried a carefully annotated translation of the Iliad with him at all times: in the back cover, he had listed hundreds of words, especially verbs and adjectives which seemed to him fresh and forceful. His editorial philosophy was described by one of his writers: "The most impressive thing was his ability to grasp instantly the largest ideas, even when they were wholly foreign to him, and his capacity for sticking to such ideas until they had been set down clearly with illuminating, readable detail." Hadden's eccentricity emerged in the only writing he did do for the weekly in the form of lively letters to the editors, under a number of assumed names, intended to evoke reader response.

In December of 1928, Hadden fell ill with a streptococcus infection. He died on February 27, 1929, just a week past his 31st birthday and exactly six years after the first issue of TIME had gone to press.