Briton Hadden

Briton Hadden (February 18, 1898 – February 27, 1929) was the co-founder of Time magazine with his Yale classmate Henry Luce. He was Time's first editor and the inventor of its revolutionary writing style, known as Timestyle. Though he died at 31, he was considered one of the most influential journalists of the twenties, a master innovator and stylist, and an iconic figure of the Jazz Age.

Early life

Hadden got his start in newspaper writing at Brooklyn's Poly Prep Country Day School, where he wrote for the school magazine, the Poly Prep, and distributed a hand-written, underground sheet to his classmates that was called The Daily Glonk. Moving to the Hotchkiss School, Hadden wrote for the Hotchkiss Record, a weekly newspaper. After an intense competition, Hadden was elected the chairman of the newspaper and Luce the assistant managing editor. Hadden then turned the Record from a weekly into a bi-weekly.

At Yale, Hadden was elected to the staff of the Yale Daily News and later served as the paper's chairman twice (1917-1918 and 1919-1920). Luce was the News' managing editor the second time. While at Yale, Hadden was a brother of Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter) and a member of Skull and Bones. It was during a break from school, when Hadden and Luce traveled south to Camp Jackson, South Carolina as ROTC officer candidates, that they began seriously discussing the idea of creating a magazine that would condense all the news of the week into a brief and easily readable "digest."