True Story (magazine)
Actress Mary Miles Minter on True Story (November, 1921). "Magdalen or Madonna?" is deceptive, since page 51 is not about Mary Miles Minter.
|
|
| Frequency | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Year founded | 1919 |
| Company | True Renditions, LLC |
| Country | USA |
| Based in | New York City |
True Story is an American magazine published by True Renditions, LLC. It was the first of the confessions magazines genre, having launched in 1919. It carried the subtitle Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction.
With a circulation of 300,000 by 1923, the trend-setting publication remained a huge success through the 1920s and was a key title in Bernarr Macfadden's publishing empire of Physical Culture, True Detective, True Romances, Dream World, True Ghost Stories, Photoplay and the tabloid New York Graphic. It sprang from Physical Culture, stemming from the many letters written the magazine by women about their experiences. By 1929, the circulation of True Story was nearly two million.
True Story offered anecdotal experiences, and the articles it presented, rewritten by staffers, were purportedly true. However, by the mid-1920s, many stories were professional submissions from fiction writers or were staff-written by Macfadden's stable of writers, including Fulton Oursler and Lyon Mearson. The language was kept relentlessly simple; Mcfadden would test language on the elevator operator, and reject whatever he could not understand. Articles were illustrated with photographs of posed models, breaking away from the idealistic illustration common in magazines.
The magazine's approach and its audience were detailed by Jackie Hatton:
The formula has been characterized as "sin-suffer-repent": the heroine violates standards of behavior, suffers as a consequence, learns her lesson and resolves to live in light of it, unembittered by her pain.
Advertisers were at first reluctant to buy ads, even as the circulation grew, but by 1928, many major companies placed ads, which copied the style of "short words and shorter sentences" and also imitated the sensational style. "Because I Confessed. . . I found the Way To Happiness" titled an Eagle Brand Condensed Sweetened Milk ad for a cookbook; the title character confessed to a married friend that a man would never propose to her because he wanted a good girl, who could cook, and received the advertised cookbook as a loan, using it to win him. "Some Wives Do It, But I Wouldn't Dare" advertised Wheatena; the narrator would never dare send her husband off without a good breakfast.
During the Great Depression, the emphasis lay on feminine behavior, maternity, marriage, and stoic endurance. Women who dedicated themselves to work were unable to marry or maintain a happy marriage; women who remained independent could not conceive or suffered miscarriages and stillbirths.
With the outbreak of World War II, the stories began to feature war work favorably. However, it continued the sexual themes, such as having war workers be seduced, have affairs with married men, or engage in many casual affairs; the Magazine Bureau objected to this, as hindering recruitment, and argued that war workers should not be shown as more prone to dalliance than other women, and the magazine removed such themes from stories dealing with war workers. The ambitious career woman still appeared; women, however, who worked from patriotic motives were able to maintain their marriages and bear children. During post-war reconversion, the emphasis changed to marriage and motherhood.
...
Wikipedia