Harold Hayes

Who was Harold Hayes?

Harold Thomas Pace Hayes, editor of Esquire magazine from 1963 to 1973, was a main architect of the New Journalism movement.

As an editor, Hayes appreciated bold writing and points of view, favoring writers with a flair for ferreting out the spirit of the time—writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, John Sack, Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley, Garry Wills, Gina Berriault, and Nora Ephron. George Lois branded the magazine with iconic covers. Fiction editor Gordon Lish brought in stories by Raymond Carver. Diane Arbus contributed photographs. Robert Benton and David Newman thought up the Dubious Achievement Awards.

More a general-interest magazine than a men's magazine then, Esquire was "a big, unruly book, its contents unbound by formulaic notions of what belonged there," Carol Polsgrove wrote in It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun?, her history of the Hayes era at Esquire.