Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
The December 19, 1955 issue of Newsweek featuring Susan Strasberg on the cover is a primary document of one of the most remarkable and historically specific theatrical phenomena of the mid-twentieth century American stage — and the particular timing of this cover, appearing in the Christmas season of 1955, captures Strasberg at the precise moment of her most extraordinary public impact. Susan Strasberg was seventeen years old when she opened in the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank in October 1955, playing the title role in a production that would become one of the most acclaimed and emotionally powerful theatrical events of the decade. The play, dramatized by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett from Anne Frank's wartime diary, had opened to extraordinary critical response — a unanimous chorus of praise that positioned it not merely as a theatrical success but as a cultural event of genuine moral and historical significance. Strasberg's performance at the center of that production — carrying the emotional weight of a story that was still raw and immediate in the consciousness of an audience that had lived through the Holocaust — was described by critics as a revelation. A seventeen-year-old actor bringing Anne Frank to life on the Broadway stage in 1955, just ten years after the end of the Second World War, was not a performance that audiences or critics could assess in purely theatrical terms. The moral and historical dimensions of the subject matter fused with Strasberg's youth — she was essentially the same age as Anne Frank had been during the diary's composition — to produce an evening of theater that transcended entertainment and became something closer to a communal act of memory and witness. For collectors building around vintage Newsweek issues focused on American theater and cultural history, this cover represents a primary document of one of Broadway's most historically significant performances at its moment of maximum critical and public impact.
Susan Strasberg's specific biography adds layers of historical significance to this cover that collectors who know the period will immediately recognize. She was the daughter of Lee Strasberg — the legendary acting teacher and artistic director of the Actors Studio whose influence on American performance was so pervasive that the acting approach he championed became simply known as "The Method." Growing up as Lee Strasberg's daughter in the world of the Actors Studio meant that Susan had been surrounded by the most serious theatrical culture in America from childhood, and her selection to play Anne Frank on Broadway was understood by the theater world as a deliberate artistic statement as much as a casting decision. Her youth, her theatrical lineage, and the specific moral gravity of the role she was playing combined to make her a figure of unusual cultural interest at the end of 1955 — the kind of figure for whom a Newsweek Christmas cover represented not commercial celebrity but genuine cultural recognition of an achievement that the magazine's editors understood as historically significant. For collectors focused on magazines from 1955, this issue documents one of the defining theatrical moments of the postwar decade at its most emotionally immediate and culturally resonant expression.
The broader cultural context of December 1955 gives this issue a historical texture that extends well beyond the theater. The mid-1950s were a period of intense and complicated American engagement with the memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust — close enough in time that the wounds were still fresh for millions of Americans with personal connections to the conflict, far enough away that the process of memorialization and cultural integration was actively underway. The Diary of Anne Frank as a Broadway production in 1955 participated in that process in a specific and historically important way — bringing the most intimate and personal testimony from the Holocaust into the mainstream American cultural experience through the medium that in 1955 remained the most culturally prestigious form of live entertainment. The play's extraordinary reception reflected not just the quality of the production but the readiness of the American public in 1955 to engage with this material through art. Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus just two weeks before this issue's publication date, on December 1, 1955 — launching the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the civil rights movement's most visible early phase. A Christmas 1955 Newsweek with Susan Strasberg and The Diary of Anne Frank on the cover exists within all of these overlapping historical contexts, making it a document of the mid-1950s American moral and cultural landscape at one of its most charged and historically consequential moments.
About the Publication
Newsweek was founded in 1933 and had established itself by the mid-1950s as one of the two or three most authoritative and widely read news magazines in the United States, competing directly with Time for the allegiance of the educated, civically engaged American readership that consumed weekly news analysis as a matter of regular civic habit. Its editorial format organized the week's news into clearly defined sections covering national and international affairs, business, science, medicine, and culture, written with the assumption that its readers were intelligent adults who wanted both information and interpretation. Its cover choices were deliberate editorial statements about who and what mattered in American public life at a given moment, and a Christmas season cover devoted to a seventeen-year-old Broadway actress playing Anne Frank in December 1955 reflects the editorial judgment that this theatrical event was not merely entertainment news but a cultural development of genuine significance deserving the magazine's most prominent weekly placement. The magazine's arts and culture coverage in the mid-1950s was substantive and seriously considered, reflecting an editorial staff that understood the relationship between artistic achievement and broader American cultural life with genuine sophistication.
Key Highlights Inside
- Susan Strasberg cover feature — The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway: A Newsweek cover appearance in December 1955 would almost certainly have been accompanied by substantial interior coverage of Strasberg's performance, the production's critical reception, and the broader cultural significance of bringing Anne Frank's story to the Broadway stage just ten years after the end of the Second World War — coverage that would have engaged both the theatrical achievement and the historical and moral dimensions that made this production a cultural event beyond ordinary theater criticism.
- The Strasberg theatrical lineage and Actors Studio context: The cultural resonance of Susan Strasberg's performance was inseparable from her identity as Lee Strasberg's daughter — a biographical detail that any serious Newsweek treatment of this moment in American theater would have engaged, placing her achievement within the context of the Method acting tradition and the Actors Studio's influence on postwar American performance.
- Mid-1950s American theater and cultural life: A December 1955 Newsweek would have included the full range of arts and culture coverage that characterized the magazine's mid-decade editorial identity — film, music, literature, and the broader cultural landscape of an America that was simultaneously experiencing extraordinary material prosperity and deep moral and historical reckoning with the recent past.
- Cold War and mid-decade domestic coverage: Published just weeks after Rosa Parks's December 1 refusal and the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a mid-December 1955 Newsweek would have been produced within the specific political atmosphere of a country where the civil rights movement was beginning to demand national attention — coverage that would have appeared alongside the Strasberg theater feature in the magazine's national affairs sections.
- Christmas season advertising as historical document: The advertising carried in a Christmas-season 1955 Newsweek — consumer electronics, domestic appliances, automobiles, and the full range of products marketed to an educated American readership at the height of the mid-decade consumer boom — constitutes primary historical material reflecting the material culture and commercial aspirations of mid-1950s Americans at the peak of postwar prosperity.
- Note: Specific interior articles, column subjects, named contributors, and individual features beyond the Susan Strasberg cover story have not been confirmed from available listing details. The above reflects what is verifiable from the cover subject, publication date, and the well-documented editorial practices and cultural context of Newsweek in December 1955.
Condition & Rarity
A seventy-year-old weekly newsmagazine surviving in newsstand condition without a mailing label is a meaningful archival result, and the condition attributes described — edge and binding wear with possible marks and rips — place this issue in the honest and contextually appropriate range that collectors of mid-1950s newsweeklies understand and accept as the authentic marks of survival across seven decades. Newsweek in December 1955 was printed on standard newsweekly paper stock — not archival quality, produced to be read and in the vast majority of cases discarded within weeks of purchase — which means that copies surviving in any collectible condition represent a genuinely small fraction of the original print run. The newsstand origin with no mailing label is the most significant positive condition attribute for any surviving copy of this issue. Subscriber copies of Newsweek from 1955 were mailed directly to readers and frequently sustained permanent label adhesive damage to the cover that detracts substantially from both visual presentation and collector appeal. A clean, label-free newsstand copy preserves the full visual integrity of the Susan Strasberg cover portrait — the primary collectible draw for an issue whose cover subject was at the center of one of the most historically and emotionally significant Broadway events of the decade — without the permanent label damage that mailed copies often sustained. Edge and binding wear in a publication of this age are honest marks of survival rather than meaningful disqualifications, and the protective plastic covering provides the appropriate preservation format going forward, stabilizing the issue against further deterioration.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
A December 1955 Newsweek with Susan Strasberg on the cover — documenting her landmark performance as Anne Frank on Broadway at the moment of its most powerful critical and cultural impact, in label-free newsstand condition, at one of the most morally and historically charged moments in mid-1950s American cultural life — is a primary document that appeals to American theater history collectors, Holocaust memorial culture scholars, and serious Newsweek cover specialists simultaneously, making it sought after across a broader collector market than most single-subject newsweekly covers from this period. If this particular issue has already been claimed, the broader Newsweek collection at OriginalMagazines.com spans the magazine's long run and regularly surfaces issues from the mid-1950s that document the postwar American cultural moment — the Broadway theater scene, the early civil rights movement, the Cold War domestic landscape, and the full range of events that made the mid-decade one of the most historically revealing and culturally rich periods in modern American history. Collectors with a specific focus on the cultural atmosphere of 1955 will find the 1955 magazine archive a rich source of primary material from a year whose documents reward serious collector attention in proportion to the significance of what they record.