Hugh Hefner, the man who helped spur the sexual revolution of the 1960s is no more. Hefner founded Playboy in 1953 with $600 of his own money and built the magazine into a multimillion-dollar entertainment empire. Hefner was born April 9, 1926, in Chicago in a conservative family. In 1944, after graduating from high school, Hefner joined the U.S. Army as a writer for a military newspaper. Following World War II, he became a promotional copywriter at Esquire magazine, where he began toying with the idea of publishing a men's magazine.

The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27 years old. Playboy remained the most successful men’s magazine in the world. The brand faded over the years, and by 2015 the magazine’s circulation had dropped to about 800,000 — although among men’s magazines it was outsold by only one, Maxim, which was founded in 1995.