Blog posts of '2026' 'November'

The Saturday Evening Post claims an ancestry extending to Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette, established in Philadelphia in 1728. The claim has frequently been dismissed as a promotional invention of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, who acquired the struggling Post in 1897. Yet the historical record reveals a more interesting story. Although the Gazette ceased publication in 1815 and the Post did not appear until 1821, surviving imprints and business records establish an intervening printing partnership between members of the Hall family, successors to Franklin's enterprise, and Samuel C. Atkinson, one of the Post's founders. There is therefore a credible institutional connection, although continuous publication and direct succession of the newspaper itself remain unproved. The Post subsequently achieved national prominence as a nineteenth-century literary weekly before Curtis and editor George Horace Lorimer transformed it into a mass-circulation magazine. At its peak around 1960, it reached nearly seven million households. Financial mismanagement, changes in advertising, television competition, and shifting cultural tastes contributed to its suspension in 1969. Revived under the SerVaas family and eventually transferred to nonprofit ownership, the magazine survives today. Its history is less a story of uninterrupted continuity than of repeated commercial and editorial reinvention.