'Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream' by Steven Watts

In Steven Watts' exhaustive, illuminating biography "Mr. Playboy," Hefner's ideal for living -- marked by his allegiances to Tarzan, Freud, Pepsi-Cola and jazz -- proves to be a kind of gloss on the Protestant work ethic. And yet "Mr. Playboy" reveals that Hefner essentially inverted that ideal by creating his own ethos, in which hard work also happens in the mind, and its rewards spring from the pursuit of pleasure, not of virtue.

Partly because of the breakneck pace and passion with which he threw himself into his publishing venture, Hefner's marriage to Millie Williams ended in March 1959. As spring was sprung, so did Hefner, who fervently embraced with his Playboy colleagues the pleasures so staunchly extolled.

As with any groundbreaking enterprise, the story of Playboy begins with the joy of the raw. Then come the plateaus of success. By 1970, Playboy had become an essential read, tackling substantive political analysis; founding a renowned jazz festival; publishing premier writers such as Alex Haley, James Jones, Ian Fleming and Ray Bradbury; introducing into the lexicon concepts like playmate and centerfold.

Such achievements were tempered by the great tragedies that often accompany great prosperity -- the suicide of Hefner's beloved aide-de-camp Bobbie Arnstein in 1975 after government agency persecutions that had sought since 1955 to find drug trafficking at Playboy; the 1980 murder of Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten, which sent Hefner into a long period of self-reflection and reevaluation.

In the 1980s, Hefner had to confront the specter of AIDS, as well as the increasing number of outlets through which consumers might access sexual material. He had a breakdown from exhaustion and then a stroke, only to recover and marry Playmate Kimberly Conrad.