Press: Esquire at Mid-Century

A birthday celebrated in black tie and a 616-page issue

On the day in 1933 that salesmen started soliciting ads for Esquire, President Franklin Roosevelt closed all the nation's banks. The magazine, which emphasized men's fashion, was to be distributed primarily through clothing stores, but the first issue's newsstand copies sold so quickly that the staff frenziedly retrieved what they could from the haberdashers. Three years later, Esquire had a profitable circulation of 440,000 and was publishing works that are still remembered, including Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's...