Better Homes and Meredith: The Magazine That Invented the Middle Class Home

In nineteen twenty-two, a Des Moines publisher named Edwin Thomas Meredith launched a magazine called Fruit, Garden and Home. Within two years, he had renamed it Better Homes and Gardens. He was betting, correctly, that American families in the nineteen twenties were hungry for exactly what the title promised: practical guidance on how to make a home that was better than the one they had grown up in.

The magazine grew into one of the largest-circulation publications in American history. By the mid-twentieth century, Better Homes and Gardens regularly sold more copies per issue than almost any other magazine in the country. Its cookbook, first published in nineteen thirty, became one of the best-known cookbooks in America, a red-and-white ring-bound reference that generations of American cooks kept in a kitchen drawer.

The Meredith Corporation that grew from E.T. Meredith's original publishing house became a media empire with dozens of titles, including Ladies' Home Journal, Family Circle, and a range of regional publications. All of it was headquartered in Des Moines, in a campus of buildings downtown that was, for decades, one of the largest publishing operations not located in New York or Chicago.

The magazine's sensibility was deliberately un-coastal and deliberately practical. Its readers were not in Manhattan. They were in places like Des Moines, Peoria, and Omaha, and they wanted to know how to grow tomatoes, refinish furniture, and bake something for a church potluck. The magazine trusted its readers to be capable of doing difficult things with the right instruction. That trust was the product.

Meredith Corporation was acquired in twenty twenty-one by Dotdash, which merged it into a larger digital media holding. The Des Moines publishing era is over. The Better Homes and Gardens brand endures.