From its modest beginnings in the form of a 1933 pamphlet on men's tailoring, Esquire magazine has gone on to achieve incredible publishing success and cultural power. Its editors offered readers for the first time an "unholy combination" of highbrow literature by writers such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Erskine Caldwell, the bawdy cartoons of E. Simms Campbell and Varga, and articles on upper-class men's fashion.

As Hugh Merrill points out, Esquire has since not only revolutionized the magazine industry, but also become part and parcel of substantial changes in American society: attitudes about sex, men's needs, pop and "high" culture, and the exploitation of an unexplored mass market - menswear.

This book chronicles the first two decades of this publishing phenomenon with a keen eye on the American cultural landscape: the stories of the men who created Esquire - Arnold Gingrich, the founding editor, and David Smart, the first publisher - their battles with censorship, the history of a now-forgotten magazine empire that included Coronet and Ken, and how Esquire's formula for success became the basis for Playboy in the 1950s and even today's New Yorker.