Cyrus Curtis

Born in Portland, Maine, Curtis was compelled to leave high school after his first year to start working, as in 1866 his family lost their home in the Great Fire of Portland. He held a variety of newspaper and advertising jobs in Portland and Boston before starting his first publication, a weekly called the People's Ledger, in Boston in 1872. In 1876, he moved to Philadelphia, then a major publishing center, to reduce his printing costs.

Curtis's first wife was Louisa Knapp. In 1883, Knapp contributed a one-page supplement to the Tribune and Farmer, a magazine published by Curtis. The following year, the supplement was expanded as an independent publication with Louisa as the editor. Its original name was The Ladies Home Journal and Practical Housekeeper, but Knapp dropped the last three words in 1886. The Ladies' Home Journal rapidly became the leading magazine of its type, reaching a circulation of one million subscriptions within ten years. It was the first American magazine to do so.

Curtis founded the Curtis Publishing Company in 1891; it would eventually publish Ladies' Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, Holiday, and others. A separate company founded by Curtis, Curtis-Martin Newspapers, controlled several newspapers, including for a time the Philadelphia Public Ledger, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the New York Evening Post. Management mistakes at the newspapers led to poor financial returns, and eventually, they were sold.

Louisa Knapp continued as editor until 1889 when she was succeeded by Edward William Bok. Several years later Bok married Mary Louise Curtis in 1896, becoming the Curtises' son-in-law. Bok retired from the magazine in 1919, but the changes he made had vastly increased circulation. Bok introduced business practices such as: low subscription rates, inclusion of advertising to off-set costs, and reliance on popular content. This operating structure was adopted by men's magazines such as McClure's and Munsey's roughly a decade after it had become the standard practice of American women's magazines. Scholars argue that women's magazines, like the Ladies' Home Journal, pioneered these strategies "magazine revolution".

Curtis was a major organizer and backer of the Philadelphia Orchestra, founded in 1900. In its early years, he paid off its debts anonymously. Curtis's daughter, Mary Louise Curtis Bok, founded Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music in 1924 and dedicated it to her father.

In memory of his boyhood music teacher, Hermann Kotzschmar, for whom he had been named, Curtis in 1912 donated the Kotzschmar Memorial Organ to Maine's Portland City Hall Auditorium. In Thomaston, Maine, he funded the 1927–29 recreation of Montpelier, the demolished 1795 mansion of Revolutionary War general Henry Knox.

Curtis was more than an occasional sailor, however, noting in a 1922 New York Times interview, "Yachting is not a hobby with me. It is a necessity. I spend half my time on this ship," and further noting that most of his meetings with staff or board members were held in the second Lyndonia's dining room. Curtis had three large yachts built at Charles L. Seabury Co.: the 115-foot Machigonne in 1904; the 163-foot Lyndonia in 1907; and the 228-foot Lyndonia in 1920. Curtis was a founding member of the Camden Yacht Club in Camden, Maine, and its Commodore from 1909 to 1933, later donating the club's facilities to the town.

While Curtis was alive, his businesses, excepting the newspapers, were generally extremely successful. The Ladies Home Journal was for decades the most widely circulating women's magazine in the US, and The Saturday Evening Post enjoyed the highest circulation of any weekly magazine in the world. In 1929, the Post and the Journal together ran fully forty percent of all US magazine advertising. One source lists Curtis as the 51st richest person ever, with a fortune of $43.2 billion adjusted for inflation (to 2008 dollars), which according to this source made him richer than J. P. Morgan.

In the summer of 1932, Curtis suffered a heart attack while aboard his yacht, the second Lyndonia. While he was recuperating at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, his second wife, Kate Stanwood Cutter Pillsbury Curtis, died suddenly. Curtis then remained in frail health until his death on June 7, 1933, less than two weeks before his eighty-third birthday, and he was interred at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

Soon after his death, most of the buildings on Curtis's estate were demolished, and his daughter founded the Curtis Hall Arboretum on the site. After the Curtis Publishing Company moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1982, the company's former headquarters on Independence Square in downtown Philadelphia became the Curtis Center, home to a conference center, offices, a health club, retail shops, and restaurants.