As publications designed to appeal to the young, the affluent, and the upwardly mobile, men’s lifestyle magazines have always had a liberal, cosmopolitan sensibility. People who join CrossFit gyms, buy designer pea coats, and winter on the Amalfi Coast (or imagine themselves wintering on the Amalfi Coast) aren’t in the market for lectures on traditional values. But in addition to covering cars, girls, and other typically masculine interests, earlier iterations of Esquire, GQ, and Playboy took an ecumenical approach to feature writing.
Despite their reputation as mindless purveyors of luxury advertisements and celebrity puff pieces, men’s magazines have long produced some of the best writing in American journalism. You may not have read “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic essay on his midlife crisis, but you’re probably familiar with its best-known line, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.” That was originally published in the February-April 1936 issue of Esquire.
