Young eager scholar of 28, Isaiah Wilner got advanced degrees in history from Yale. About a year before he moved from New Haven, Conn., to New York City, a historical topic burst into his mind.

The idea for "The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal and the Creation of Time Magazine" germinated while he was standing in the Briton Hadden Memorial Building, 202 York St. in New Haven, where he had worked as an editor at the Yale Daily News.

"On the top floor, Hadden's dusty portrait presides over the wood-paneled boardroom. The painting is dimly lit by a frequently burned-out old lamp. Hadden sits in his shirtsleeves and a green eyeshade. I was interested in his expression — a sideways, mysterious smile."

So said Wilner during a phone conversation from New York City.

"I started looking up his editorials — he was quick and sharp," said Wilner. "The plaque said he 'created a new form of journalism.' You could see from his writing that he had a lot to do with what became Time magazine. I was captivated by it. I wondered why so few people had heard of him."

Soon Wilner was reading not only Hadden's writing, but that attributed to Henry Luce, the other half of the team that founded Time magazine in 1923 before either had arrived at the age of 25. Of particular interest was the fact that Luce and Hadden, who had been students together at Yale, had personalities diametrically opposed to each other.

"These guys were a perfect partnership," said Wilner, "except that the tension in that partnership contained the seeds of its demise. I wrote an essay about Hadden for a class on the art of biography taught by John Lewis Gaddis."

The next year, Wilner sent his essay to Walter Isaacson, then Time's managing editor and one of Benjamin Franklin's biographers. Isaacson turned the key that unlocked the Time archives for Wilner, and his exciting project took off.

Wilner found the people at Time's corporate archives to be very cooperative. "They have hundreds of interviews on file there, and they have kept Hadden and Luce's letters in perfect condition."

Wilner found Hadden to be "a Promethean figure with many original ideas and only six years to develop them (before he died of a mysterious illness). But today almost no one knows anything about Hadden. Going through their papers revealed that their families loved them deeply. They felt when they were very small that these boys were going to do well."

The research was so rich with material that "it grabbed me," said Wilner. "When I read the oral history reminiscences I really got excited. Hadden and Luce had an intellectual friendship, a meeting of the minds. I think they loved each other. Their partnership gives us a new take on the '20s. F. Scott Fitzgerald talked about 'the lost generation' — but Hadden and Luce were go-getters."