Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
The August 1973 issue of Esquire — cover-titled "A New American Hero at Last" — arrives at one of the most culturally charged moments in the magazine's history and in American public life. August 1973 was the heart of the Watergate summer: the Senate Watergate Committee hearings had been televised nationally since May, John Dean had delivered his devastating testimony in June, and by August the question of Nixon's survival in office was genuinely open. The concept of a "new American hero" in this context was not casual editorial framing — it was a deliberate cultural provocation, inviting readers to ask what heroism meant in a country whose institutions and leadership had been exposed as comprehensively corrupt. Esquire under Harold Hayes's editorship had been one of the defining publications of new journalism and cultural criticism through the late 1960s and early 1970s, and an August 1973 cover story on American heroism was squarely within the magazine's editorial tradition of using popular cultural framing to engage serious questions about American identity and values. For collectors building archives of vintage Esquire magazines, the Hayes-era issues from the early 1970s represent some of the most intellectually ambitious and culturally resonant material in the title's long run.
The editorial content confirmed in this issue's table of contents is exceptional by any measure. Lillian Hellman's "The White House Garage Sale" — published in the summer of Watergate — places one of America's most prominent and politically engaged writers in direct satirical engagement with the Nixon administration's unraveling. Hellman, the playwright and memoirist whose work had been shaped by her own experience of political persecution during the McCarthy era, brought a specific moral authority to Watergate commentary that gave her Esquire piece a weight beyond standard political satire. Ron Rosenbaum's "The Corpse as Big as the Ritz" — a title riffing on F. Scott Fitzgerald — signals the literary ambition that characterized Esquire's journalism in this period, and the fiction by Alexander Theroux represents the magazine's consistent commitment to publishing serious literary work alongside its journalism and cultural commentary. Collectors of 1973 magazines will find this issue unusually rich in verified, named content across journalism, fiction, and cultural criticism.
Reynolds Price's contribution — "What Did Emma Bovary Do in Bed?" — reflects the literary-critical ambition that Esquire brought to its cultural coverage in this era, treating Flaubert's canonical novel as a subject for serious contemporary re-examination in a men's general interest magazine. That this piece appears in the same issue as Watergate satire by Lillian Hellman and new fiction by Alexander Theroux is a marker of the editorial range that made Esquire under Hayes genuinely distinctive. The martial arts essay mentioned in the listing also places this issue within the early-1970s American mainstream discovery of Asian martial arts — a cultural trend that was gaining significant popular attention in 1973 following Bruce Lee's breakthrough in the American market.
About the Publication
Esquire, founded in 1933, was by 1973 in the final years of Harold Hayes's transformative editorship, which had run from 1963 and had made the magazine one of the primary vehicles for the new journalism movement. Its audience was educated, male, and broadly engaged with American cultural and political life, and its editorial format combined major reported features, literary fiction, cultural criticism, and the visual sophistication of George Lois's cover designs into a monthly that consistently engaged with American culture at a level of seriousness and creativity that few competitors matched. The Hayes era Esquire had published foundational works by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, and a generation of writers who defined American literary journalism, and the August 1973 issue represents that editorial tradition at full strength during one of the most turbulent summers in American political history.
Key Highlights Inside
- "A New American Hero at Last" cover story — A culturally framed cover feature examining American heroism published at the height of the Watergate summer, when the question of what American public life stood for was more urgently open than at any point since the 1960s.
- "The White House Garage Sale" — Lillian Hellman — Political satire on the Nixon administration by one of America's most prominent and morally authoritative literary voices, published during the Senate Watergate hearings — primary source material for students of the Watergate era's cultural response.
- "The Corpse as Big as the Ritz" — Ron Rosenbaum — A feature from one of Esquire's most distinctive journalists of the period, whose literary-inflected reporting style exemplified the new journalism approach the magazine championed.
- "What Did Emma Bovary Do in Bed?" — Reynolds Price — Literary criticism engaging Flaubert's canonical novel by the North Carolina novelist and critic, representing the magazine's consistent inclusion of serious literary-critical writing alongside its journalism.
- Fiction by David Kranes and Alexander Theroux — Original short fiction from two literary writers, with Theroux in particular representing the postmodern literary tradition that Esquire was actively publishing during this period alongside its journalism.
- Martial arts cultural essay — Coverage of the early-1970s American martial arts phenomenon, documenting the mainstream cultural moment when Asian martial arts were crossing over from specialty interest into broad American popular culture following Bruce Lee's film breakthrough.
Condition & Rarity
Excellent condition with light wear represents a strong survival grade for a fifty-plus-year-old monthly magazine, and for a Hayes-era Esquire with the editorial density this issue demonstrates, it is a meaningful positive attribute. Esquire was printed on paper stock of good quality for its era, and issues that have been carefully stored typically retain their cover color and interior page brightness well at this condition grade. The plastic protective covering indicates deliberate preservation. For Esquire issues from this period, the specific condition points most worth confirming are the cover's color vibrancy — the magazine's covers were often produced with bold, graphic color that can fade with light exposure — and the completeness of the Hellman and Rosenbaum pieces as the interior sections of greatest independent research and collector interest. Light wear as the primary noted condition factor suggests an above-average survival state for a publication of this age and category.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
Hayes-era Esquire issues with the editorial depth this August 1973 number demonstrates — Lillian Hellman on Watergate, Reynolds Price on Flaubert, Alexander Theroux fiction — are among the more substantive finds in the vintage men's magazine market, and excellent-condition copies require patience to locate. The broader Esquire archive at OriginalMagazines.com spans many decades of the publication's run and regularly surfaces landmark issues from the Hayes era and beyond. For collectors focused on the specific Watergate-summer cultural moment this issue captures so fully, the full 1973 magazine collection documents one of the most consequential years in postwar American political and cultural history across a wide range of titles.