Joseph J. Thorndike

Billings kept a diary in which, according to Loudon Wainwright's book The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of Life, he called Thorndike "a mulish young Yankee," and "a stubborn little New England cuss".

[2] Wainwright himself called Thorndike "a handsome, bright, reserved, efficient fellow...ambitious, proud, marked from the start for bigger things.

They enlarged it, turned it into a hardcover, profusely illustrated bimonthly with no advertisements, and hired popular American Civil War historian Bruce Catton as editor and writer.

David McCullough, author of the bestsellers Truman and John Adams, and writer and editor for the magazine, later said that it was "the best place I ever worked as an employee...

American Heritage sold to McGraw-Hill in 1970, to private investor Samuel Pryor Reed of New York City in 1976, to Forbes in 1986, and to an independent publisher, Edwin S. Grosvenor, in 2007.

In 1993 Thorndike published his last book, The Coast: A Journey Down the Atlantic Shore, which Kirkus Reviews described as "an effective combination of eyeball observation, rich history, and sad acknowledgment of how poorly we have used still another national resource."