Publishing Magnate, Philanthropist. Founded the Reader's Digest with his wife, Lila Bell Acheson Wallace. He was born on November 12, 1889 in St. Paul Minnesota, the son of a Presbyterian minister and President of Macalester College. Attended but never graduated from University of California, Berkeley. Devised a system of condensing articles to their essence. At first he did this with pamphlets from the Department of Agriculture, making the information more accessible to farmers. He served as a sergeant in the US Army in WWI and while recuperating in a French hospital for many months he practiced his condensing skills. He shared his idea for the new magazine with a social worker named Lila Acheson Bell, who was very enthusiastic and soon agreed to marry him. With money borrowed from family members they published the first 5,000-copy issue of The Reader's Digest in 1922, relying upon rented mailing lists to obtain subscribers. Each issue offered 31 informational articles (one for each day of the month) of a practical, down-home, politically conservative and patriotic nature, at first with no advertising. Subscriptions flooded in. Initially, they published out of a basement apartment in Greenwich Village, with DeWitt Wallace (aka "Wally") doing his condensation in the periodicals room of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street in New York. Soon they headed to Pleasantville, New York about an hour north of New York City. Then in 1937 they created a brick Georgian headquarters in the nearby town of Chappaqua (though they kept the homey address "Pleasantville"). Wallace's idea proved to be what the Harvard Business School in its "Great Leaders in Business" website called "the most successful publishing venture of all time." A large number of international offices were established and it is estimated that about 30 million people read the magazine at its peak; it is currently published in 19 languages in some 48 editions. Advertising was accepted in the mid-fifties, and original articles were also accepted, some having been "planted" first in other publications. Condensed books became popular, and the RDA's incredible mailing list was used to sell everything from records and a condensed version of the Bible to stereos. DeWitt Wallace died at 91 on March 31st, 1981. Lila Wallace died in 1984. Wally was reported to have coined his own epitaph sometime earlier with the phrase: "The final condensation." Having no heirs, the company went public after the death of Lila Wallace, providing a windfall for many charitable organizations including Colonial Williamsburg, The New York Metropolitan Museum and Macalester College, among many other institutions.