Henry Winters Luce was born on September 24, 1868 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, United States, the second son and youngest of three children of Van Rensselaer William and Adelia (Tedrick) Luce. His father, a native of Cooperstown, New York, and a prosperous wholesale merchant and insurance broker, was a seventh-generation descendant of Henry Luce, an Englishman who settled on Martha's Vineyard in 1643; his mother, born in Pennsylvania, came of German and English stock.
In his twentieth year Luce entered Yale, from which he graduated with the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1892. Then he gave up his original plan for a career in law and enrolled in Union Theological Seminary in New York City in order to train for the parish ministry. There he came under the influence of the Student Volunteer Movement and decided to offer himself as a missionary to China. In 1894 he interrupted his theological education for a year of service as one of three traveling agents of the Student Volunteer Movement, visiting colleges in the South and Southwest while two fellow Yale alumni and Union classmates--Sherwood Eddy, who had volunteered for India, and Horace T. Pitkin, another China volunteer--toured the East and Middle West. At the conclusion of this mission Luce transferred to Princeton Theological Seminary with his friend Eddy for the final year of ministerial training and was granted the Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1896. On May 20, 1897, he was ordained to the ministry by his hometown pastor.
Luce started his career by taking the post of traveling secretary of the Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance. In 1897 he accepted the missionary position for the China field from the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church. In October that year he arrived in China and established his residence at Tengchow in Shantung province, where the Presbyterian Mission operated a small college to which Henry Luce was assigned as a teacher of physics, English, and other subjects. He remained with the college, which in 1904 moved to Wei-hsien, until 1915.
Besides his teaching and his intensive study of Chinese, which resulted in the publication of a translation of a Harmony of the Gospels and other religious materials, Luce was active in the promotion of interdenominational cooperation in missionary education. He made two trips to the United States (1905-1906, 1912 - 1915) to raise funds for this purpose, and at the end of 1915 he accepted the vice-presidency of Shantung Christian (Cheeloo) University, an institution which had grown out of the Presbyterian college at Wei-hsien but was supported jointly by American Presbyterians and English Baptists and Anglicans.
Two years later, however, disagreements among the members of the teaching and administrative staff of the newly integrated university led to the resignation of the somewhat quick-tempered Luce, who moved to Shanghai as secretary of the China Christian Education Association. In 1919, after completing an extensive survey of missionary schools for the association, Luce was persuaded to return to academic administration as vice-president of Yenching University, a new interdenominational institution then being organized in Peking by American and English Congregationalists and American Methodists and Presbyterians. Along with Yenching's president, J. Leighton Stuart, Luce was chiefly responsible for securing the financial backing for this major project in higher education in China, spending all but one of the next eight years as a fund raiser in America.
In 1927 declining health and a desire to return to academic life caused him to sever his active relationship with Yenching. The next year he was appointed to a professorship in the Chinese department of the Kennedy School of Missions of the Hartford Theological Foundation in Hartford, Connecticut, where he remained until retirement in 1935. His experience as an educator in both China and the United States, reinforced by an extended tour of Asia in 1935--1936, had convinced him of the need to develop better understanding of the non-Western world among Americans, and in an attempt to help realize this objective, he inaugurated a series of summer "Interpreters' Institutes" for churchmen and others at Silver Bay, New York, beginning in 1939.
Two years later, Luce, who suffered from arteriosclerosis, died in his sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage at his home in Haverford, Pennsylvania.
Luce was distinguished for his work in interdenominational cooperation in missionary education. He raised sizable amounts of money for some Chinese institutions, enabling them to become renowned Christian schools of higher learning. He also published five books in Chinese and helped establish in New York the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia in 1932.
Luce was an active member of the Presbyterian Church.
Luce was an able administrator and highly successful fund raiser, despite his personal preference for a life of scholarship and teaching.
On June 1, in Palmyra, New York, Luce married Elizabeth Middleton Root, a social worker for the Scranton Y. W. C. A. He was the father of four children: Henry Robinson, Emmavail, Elisabeth Middleton, and Sheldon Root. The eldest, who founded and edited Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, erected two memorial buildings in China in honor of his father: a student pavilion at Yenching University in Peking and a chapel on the campus of Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan.
