Condé Nast
The Man and His Empire -- A Biography
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The first biography in over thirty years of Condé Nast, the pioneering publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair and main rival to media magnate William Randolph Hearst.
Condé Nast’s life and career was as high profile and glamorous as his magazines. Moving to New York in the early twentieth century with just the shirt on his back, he soon became the highest paid executive in the United States, acquiring Vogue in 1909 and Vanity Fair in 1913. Alongside his editors, Edna Woolman Chase at Vogue and Frank Crowninshield at Vanity Fair, he built the first-ever international magazine empire, introducing European modern art, style, and fashions to an American audience.
Credited with creating the “café society,” Nast became a permanent fixture on the international fashion scene and a major figure in New York society. His superbly appointed apartment at 1040 Park Avenue, decorated by the legendary Elsie de Wolfe, became a gathering place for the major artistic figures of the time. Nast launched the careers of icons like Cecil Beaton, Clare Boothe Luce, Lee Miller, Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. He left behind a legacy that endures today in media powerhouses such as Anna Wintour, Tina Brown, and Graydon Carter.
Written with the cooperation of his family on both sides of the Atlantic and a dedicated team at Condé Nast Publications, critically acclaimed biographer Susan Ronald reveals the life of an extraordinary American success story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The magazine mogul who turned Vogue into a fashion bible was the calm center of a swirling Jazz Age culture, according to this fizzy biography. Historian Ronald (Heretic Queen) toasts Cond Nast as a canny businessman and marketer who, after his 1909 purchase of Vogue, pioneered a new kind of magazine catering to the upper-crust "New Woman" and high-end advertisers; he then bought Vanity Fair, which became an icon of literary and pictorial flair to a New York "caf society" of socialites, artists and celebrities in the Roaring '20s. Ronald's Nast is polished, tasteful, unpretentious, polite, kind, and rather dull: he threw fabulous parties in a Manhattan penthouse flowing with bootleg champagne, but often spent them in his library playing bridge. Fortunately, Ronald regularly leaves the bland Nast to follow livelier figures, such as VF theater critic and Algonquin Roundtable wit Dorothy Parker, whom Nast fired for courting libel suits with her acidic reviews. Ronald writes in a vivid, sparkling, amused style critic Alexander Woolcott "resembled an overfed human owl with eyes like raisins that sunk behind his spectacles into his jowls" and revels in the era's repartee, clothes and gossip. Her portrait of Nast doesn't leave a strong impression, but her evocation of the vibrant scene around him will keep readers entertained. Photos.
