Wallace, DeWitt

Wallace, (William Roy) DeWitt

(born Nov. 12, 1889, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.—died March 30, 1981, Mount Kisco, N.Y.) U.S. publisher and, with his wife, Lila Acheson, founder of Reader's Digest magazine. Wallace began an index of favourite magazine articles while he was a college student, and he developed the idea of a pocket-sized digest of popular articles while recuperating from wounds suffered in World War I. He married Acheson in 1921. After various publishers rejected the digest idea, the Wallaces began publishing Reader's Digest themselves on a low budget and had rapid success. DeWitt Wallace served as editor until 1965. The couple, who had no heirs, supported numerous philanthropic causes; the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund (reorganized in 2003 as the Wallace Foundation) was a major benefactor of the arts and culture.