Oliver Jensen, 91; Historical Writer

Oliver O. Jensen, who co-founded and later was editor of American Heritage magazine and was the author of many historical books and articles, died Thursday. He was 91.

Jensen, who had been a longtime resident of Old Saybrook, Conn., died in an assisted living center, according to his family.

Jensen was born April 16, 1914, in Ithaca, N.Y., the son of Dorothea and Gerald E. Jensen, who taught English at Connecticut College.

He earned a bachelor’s degree at Yale University in 1936 and began a career in advertising and radio. By 1940 he was on the staff of Life magazine as a writer.

During World War II, he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve on a destroyer in the Atlantic and an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.

Material from one of his articles that talked about slang and legends of the Navy was later included in Jensen’s first book, “Carrier War” (1945), which also featured first-person accounts of officers and soldiers who fought in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific.

Jensen left the Navy as a lieutenant and resumed his work at Life. In 1954, along with Joseph J. Thorndike Jr. and James Parton, he launched American Heritage with historian Bruce Catton as editor.

Catton, who had by then written the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “A Stillness at Appomattox” (1953), announced in the first issue: “We intend to deal with that great, unfinished and illogically inspiring story of the American people doing, being and becoming.”

Jensen’s article “The Old Fall River Line,” about the era of side-wheel steamboat travel on Long Island Sound, led off that initial issue. Within five years, the bimonthly magazine had grown from 10,000 subscribers to more than 300,000. Circulation now is about 340,000.

Jensen was the magazine’s managing editor from 1956 to 1959 and editor from 1959 to 1976.

He also served as editorial director of Horizon magazine during the 1960s and was editorial director of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1969). From 1981 to 1983, he was chief of the division of prints and photographs at the Library of Congress.

Other books that Jensen wrote, co-wrote or edited include “The Revolt of American Women” (1952), “American Album” (1968) and “High Honor: Recollections by Men and Women of World War II Aviation” (1989).

Jensen was married five times, including a brief marriage to novelist Jean Stafford that ended in divorce. His fifth wife, the former Alison Pfeiffer Hargrove, whom he married in 1970, died in 2000. Survivors include stepdaughter Penelope Hargrove of Santa Cruz and stepsons Christopher Hargrove of West Hollywood and Stephen Hargrove of Los Angeles.