1. Okay, people who don't like me tweeting about Hefner might want to mute for the next half hour or so.https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/914322154216411136 …
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3. One thing I didn't go into was Hefner's undeniable gifts as an editor -- which is also a very complicated story!
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4. There's no question Hefner was one of the most important USA editors -- just a notch below William Shawn, Harold Hayes or Tina Brown
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5. Interesting skill Hefner had as an editor was he fused highbrow with low. Playboy famous for publishing Nabokov, Updike, Atwood etc
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6. But Hefner also had an eye for the pulps & comics, where he got Jack Cole, Harvey Kurtzman, Theodore Sturgeon, Gahan Wilson & others
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7. As a meeting ground for High & Low culture, for girlie pin-ups & Nabokovian prose, Play was early example of post-modernism.
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8. And yet, unlike Katharine White or William Shawn, I'm not sure Hefner got the best out of the undeniably gifted people he hired.
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9. The paradigmatic case for the problem with Hefner as editor is how he used & abused Harvey Kurtzman.
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10. Kurtzman, the creator of MAD magazine & much else, was down on his luck in 1960s.He had cut ties with Mad &other ventures failed
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11. Hefner both saved Kurtzman's life & ruined his talent by giving him a regular gig. Alas it was the T&A strip Little Annie Fanny.
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12. It was to Hefner's credit that he recognized (decades ahead of the critics) Kurtzman's gifts. But he deployed those gifts in dumb way
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13. In sum: as editor Hefner had tremendous eye for talent but wasn't always the best at cultivating that talent.
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End of conversation
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