Hugh Marston Hefner was a controversial American magazine publisher. He was the founder and

Hugh Marston Hefner was a controversial American magazine publisher. He was the founder and editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine, a publication with revealing photographs and articles which provoked charges of obscenity.

Hefner extended the Playboy brand into a world network of Playboy Clubs. He also resided in luxury mansions where Playboy playmates shared his wild partying life, fueling keen media interest. He was a political activist in the Democratic Party and for the causes of First Amendment rights, animal rescue, and the restoration of the Hollywood Sign.

EARLY LIFE
Hefner was born in Chicago on April 9, 1926, the first child of Glenn Lucius Hefner (1896 to 1976), an accountant, and his wife Grace Caroline (Swanson) Hefner (1895 to 1997) who worked as a teacher. His parents were from Nebraska. He had a younger brother, Keith (1929 to 2016). His mother was of Swedish ancestry, and his father was German and English.

Through his father's line, Hefner was a descendant of Plymouth governor William Bradford. He described his family as "conservative, Midwestern, [and] Methodist". His mother had wanted him to become a missionary.

He attended Sayre Elementary School and Steinmetz High School, then served from 1944 to 1946 as a U.S. Army writer for a military newspaper. Hefner graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1949 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a double minor in Creative Writing and Art, having earned his degree in two and a half years. After graduation, he took a semester of graduate courses in Sociology at Northwestern University, but dropped out soon after.

CAREER
In January 1952, Hefner left his job as a copywriter for Esquire after he was denied a $5 raise. In 1953, he took out a mortgage loan of $600 and raised $8,000 from 45 investors (including $1,000 from his mother—"not because she believed in the venture," he told E! in 2006, "but because she believed in her son") to launch Playboy, which was initially going to be called Stag Party. The first issue was published in December 1953 and featured Marilyn Monroe from a 1949 nude calendar shoot she did under a pseudonym. That first issue sold more than 50,000 copies. (Hefner never met Monroe, but he bought the crypt next to hers at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in 1992 for $75,000.)

Esquire magazine rejected Charles Beaumont's science fiction story "The Crooked Man" in 1955, so Hefner agreed to publish it in Playboy. The story highlighted straight men being persecuted in a world where homosexuality was the norm. The magazine received angry letters, so Hefner responded, "If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too." In 1961, Hefner watched Dick Gregory perform at the Herman Roberts Show Bar in Chicago, and he hired Gregory to work at the Chicago Playboy Club. Gregory attributed the launch of his career to that night.

Hefner promoted a bon vivant lifestyle in his magazine and in the television shows that he hosted Playboy's Penthouse (1959 to 1960) and Playboy After Dark (1969 to 1970). He was also the chief creative officer of Playboy Enterprises, the publishing group which operates the magazine.

On June 4, 1963, Hefner was arrested for promoting obscene literature after he published an issue of Playboy featuring nude shots of Jayne Mansfield in bed with a man present. The case went to trial and resulted in a hung jury.

In the 1960s, Hefner created "private key" clubs that were racially diverse. During the civil rights movement in 1966, Hefner sent Alex Haley to interview American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell, much to Rockwell's shock because Haley was black. Rockwell agreed to meet with Haley only after gaining assurance that he was not Jewish,...

LINK TO ARTICLE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Hefner

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