Ken W. Purdy, a noted journalist and editor of men's magazines and a renowned expert on classic automobiles and sports cars, was born in Chicago in 1913 and raised in New York. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early 1930s on a scholarship received because his father, William T. Purdy, had composed the score for “On, Wisconsin.” At Wisconsin, Purdy majored in English literature and worked briefly for the Daily Cardinal, the school newspaper.
Purdy left school during his junior year and in 1934 became a reporter for the Athol Daily News in Massachusetts. For the next several decades his career was to be marked by the constant shifting from one publication to another that was typical of magazine journalists during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1935 Purdy became editor of the Oshkosh Free Press, and by 1936 he was associate editor of the Madison Clarion Record. In 1936 he also began an association with a number of radio publications: the Radio Guide in Chicago in 1936, Click (Philadelphia) in 1938, and back to Chicago in the following year as managing editor of Radio Digest.
In 1939 Purdy became associate editor and a contributor to Look. Two years later he became editor-in-chief of Victory, a nine-language publication of the Office of War Information published in association with Crowell-Collier. In 1946 he was appointed editor of Parade magazine. By the time he left three years later, Parade's circulation had grown markedly. In 1949 Purdy became editor of True magazine, the first and foremost publication in the men's magazine genre. Purdy was instructed to improve the quality of the magazine, which had recently emerged as a slick monthly, and accordingly Purdy downplayed fiction in favor of action and adventure non-fiction. Purdy attracted quality writers to the magazine, and by the time he departed in 1954 he could point to True's publication of two of journalism's most celebrated stories: an in-depth report on the 1950 flying saucer hoax and the exposé of the World War II Holohan murder. Despite his success at True, Purdy resigned in 1954 to become editor of Argosy, its major competitor. Less than a year later he resigned from that position.
In 1956 Purdy began a long term relationship with Playboy magazine as writer and contributing editor. Over the next seventeen years, he wrote over seventy pieces for Playboy (and anonymously rewrote others) while still continuing to freelance for other publications. Purdy's writing for Playboy continued in the action/adventure vein, with his best known stories concerning the automobile business.
In his writing career Purdy was the author of some 350 non-fiction pieces, a figure which does not include his newspaper articles and book reviews, and he won a number of awards for his writings. Many of his essays have been reprinted, perhaps most notably his 1953 story on his son Geoffrey who had polio. Some critics consider Purdy's fiction, which included eight books, to be his best work. His Kings of the Road was one of the largest-selling automobile books of its era. Other books covered automobile history, classic car museums, and young people and driving. He also co-authored All But My Life, the autobiography of Stirling Moss.
During the 1960s Purdy was involved in the motion picture industry. In 1965-1966 he developed an unproduced screenplay based on Robert Daley's The Cruel Sport. In addition, he was involved with rewrites on Le Mans (1971) and a documentary on matador Arruza.
Ken Purdy committed suicide in 1972.
