Reader's Digest

Wallace never surveyed readers about their article preferences. Until he and his wife turned over control of the magazine to senior editors during the 1970s, he selected the articles for condensation based on what interested him, mindful of the need to appeal to a large audience of both sexes and all educational levels.

In 1954, Reader's Digest business manager Albert Cole called the magazine "the greatest common denominator in communications we have." The topics were almost always universal: science and nature, morals, health, ordeals, education, biography, animals, lifestyle, sex, and humor. The contents remained remarkably similar over the years, including feature departments such as "My Most Unforgettable Character," "Humor in Uniform," "Campus Comedy," "Life in These United States," "Picturesque Speech," "News in Medicine," and "It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power." Occasionally, Wallace's personal tastes intruded. Often, articles were heartwarming and inspirational, involved personal success stories such as his own, or advocated a nondenominational Protestantism that was described as "muscular Christianity."

Carl Sandburg once complained that Reader's Digest was "often as solemn as death and now and then funny as a barrel of monkeys." The Wallaces were criticized for their socially and politically conservative agenda, which chided labor, big government, and any form of political radicalism, and their all but open endorsement of the Republican Party. The magazine's staff even wrote articles for other publications, adhering to the Wallaces' conservative leanings, so that they could be reprinted in Reader's Digest. The magazine defended such "plants" as a means of providing proper editorial balance. The magazine was also criticized for refusing to publish any letters to the editor, especially corrections or rebuttals. The editors maintained that the mail was usually evenly split, making letters unnecessary. Furthermore, Reader's Digest articles were shortened by as much as three-fourths from the manuscripts, leading to complaints that the condensations diluted or lost the entire point of the original. Although conservative, the magazine did not shy away from controversy. Some Reader's Digest articles reported on medical or scientific breakthroughs years before details appeared in other publications. The magazine also published crusading articles on venereal disease, cigarette smoking, safe driving, conservation, and other populist-style issues. Competitors such as Literary Digest, Quick, and Esquire's one-time popular Coronet tried but failed to seriously challenge Reader's Digest.

From 5,000 first issues, the circulation of Reader's Digest soared for most of the twentieth century. The Wallaces kept circulation figures secret until 1936, but the number of copies exceeded 200,000 by 1930, one million in 1935, and nine million by 1950. In 1954, it was estimated that one out of every four families in the United States received the magazine. The domestic circulation peaked at over 17 million copies in 1984, second only to TV Guide. The magazine's profits were enhanced by a series of foreign editions, beginning with Great Britain in 1938 and extending to 49 international editions, published in 19 languages, with a total circulation of over 28 million that made Reader's Digest the most widely read periodical on the planet.