Esquire, 1790 Broadway, New York NY 10019, Tel: 202-459-7500, Subs: 515-282-1607.

Esquire was founded in 1933 as an upscale "men's" magazine, which in practice meant a mix of men's fashions, "quality" fiction and nonfiction, and decorous seminudes.

Yet for a few years in the 1960s, Esquire unexpectedly emerged as perhaps the best general-interest magazine in the country, if not the world. Some remarkable editors (Clay Felker, Harold Hayes) assembled an equally remarkable group of columnists and reporters, and gave them their heads. Norman Mailer was dispatched to the 1960 Democratic Convention. Garry Wills followed the civil rights revolution around the country. Michael Herr reported from the boonies in Vietnam. Articles got longer and more personal, and adapted the techniques of fiction to the needs of journalism. This was a broader, deeper literary movement than one might gather from accounts of "the new journalism" by Tom Wolfe, whose early Esquire pieces on pop culture made him famous. Decades later, and despite all the subsequent excesses of first-person journalism, the positive legacy of the Esquire of the 1960s is still with us. Today's Esquire still includes superior investigative journalism in its mix -- but not questions about the political and sexual status quo. -- Steve Badrich

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