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The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine. By James Landers. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. xiv, 354 pp. $34.95, isbn 978-0-8262-1906-0.)
Media historians have not neglected Cosmopolitan. The magazine has been profiled in books, referenced in anthologies, deconstructed in refereed journals, framed in dissertations, and discussed in newspapers and trade publications. Yet most of the research - and commentary - has focused on the Cosmopolitan developed by Helen Gurley Brown in 1965 and on the magazine's continued success for the past forty-six years.
Less is known about the magazines evolution from a "family literary" magazine described by the historian Algernon Tassin as a "clergyman's child" because it was so conservative and domestic The Magazine in America, 1916, p. 358) to an international publication for the "fun, fearless female." That story is told in The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine...