In January 1954, Time Inc. founder Henry Luce launched a new pet project, a sports magazine for the literate upper-middle-class. Now into its fifth decade, Sports Illustrated is a publishing-industry success story, the second biggest magazine in the world (behind People), and the most profound example of America's adoption of sports as a metaphor for life. Michael MacCambridge, who raises the literary documentary almost to the level of fable, chooses to tell the story of SI's meteoric rise and not-quite-fall through the lives and careers of its fascinating staffers: dry Ivy Leaguer Henry Luce, clueless Harvard snob/evil Walter Mitty/New Yorker groupie George Plimpton, brilliant editor and motivator André Laguerre, football savant Paul Zimmerman, swimsuit-issue tyrant Jule Campbell, preeminent sports photographer Walter Iooss Jr., and literally hundreds more. Altogether, MacCambridge artfully weaves together information from over 300 interviews to tell a gripping story, not just of journalism, but of human interaction. The unusual, often excruciating pressures of putting out a weekly specialty magazine—the amazing lack of discipline among amazingly talented writers, the ability of editors to inspire a reporter to brilliance or near-suicidal despondence, the grueling 16-hour days—make for great reading. Great by any standard, the book addresses the purpose of print journalism, the sort of people who pursue it, and the undefinable heroic quality in men who lift a simple thing to the status of American myth.