ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Clare Boothe Luce’s early career as an author, magazine editor, and playwright. At age 26, despite lacking both higher education and experience, Clare was hired as an editorial assistant for Condé Nast’s magazines. Rising quickly and soon contributing her own articles as well, she was named Vanity Fair’s managing editor before she turned 30. She led the magazine in a political direction, a logical move amidst the tumult of the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which Clare opposed. Restless and dissatisfied, Clare resigned after 15 months to write plays. In the meantime, she married Henry Luce, rich and powerful chief of Time Inc. Their marriage was constantly fraught but made them a leading American power couple for decades. Clare’s first Broadway play, Abide With Me (1935), flopped, but The Women (1936), Kiss the Boys Good-Bye (1938), and Margin for Error (1939) were all significant hits, later produced as Hollywood movies, and established Luce as a major satirical playwright of the 1930s. Evident from the plays’ content, her interest in politics had only grown, especially in the shadow of Nazi expansionism. As war broke out in 1939, she decided to work as a war journalist.
