Charles Atlas often started interviews by stripping off his shirt and sitting at his desk half-nude. His physique was his stock in trade, and he knew that people wanted a look. They got an eyeful: chest forty-seven inches; waist thirty-two; biceps seventeen.

Whether such splendor really sprang from the frame of a ninety-seven-pound weakling, as the pulp magazine ads for his mail-order muscle business proclaimed, is a fair question. Judging from a photograph taken when he was a teen-ager in Brooklyn, he was a fairly slender youngster, but no more so than a lot of growing boys. As the years passed, the man and the myth became increasingly muddled. Atlas’ ads told the tale of the puny young man who had sand kicked in his face at the beach by a bully. Yes, Atlas sometimes said, a lifeguard had really done that to him at Coney Island, embarrassing him in front of his date, and it was this incident that had triggered his resolve to make himself so formidable no one would trifle with him again. But on other occasions he traced his determination to perfect his body to a visit to the Brooklyn Museum, where a huge statue of Hercules caught his eye. He credited a statue of Atlas—either at Coney Island or atop a local bank, depending on which day he was being interviewed—with inspiring his choice of a name when he became a professional muscleman.

He had been born Angela Siciliano in southern Italy in 1892 and was brought to the United States by his parents at the age of eleven. Having developed his physique by diligent workouts at a YMCA gymnasium, he entered a competition sponsored by Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine in 1922. He won and was awarded a thousand dollars and the title of “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man. ” Capitalizing on the publicity, he dreamed up the Charles Atlas muscle-building course. The program consisted of thirteen lessons, brief pamphlets mailed out weekly, and it cost thirty dollars. In time, with the aid of an astute business manager named Charles P. Roman, he built a business that enrolled more than seventy thousand students a year, mainly young men. It continues to flourish today, even though Atlas died of a heart attack in 1972 at the age of eighty.

Atlas published the course in seven languages, and the ads featuring him wearing a loincloth and flexing his muscles drew disciples from all over the world. His organization still maintains an office in London besides its Manhattan headquarters, and at one time it had an office in Buenos Aires as well. In a 1942 interview with The New Yorker writer Robert Lewis Taylor, he claimed to have received a letter from India reading: “I’ve heard of the wonderful work you are doing and wonder if there is some way you can build me