People (magazine) members regularly slept on the floor of their offices two or three nights each week and severely limited all non-essential outside engagements. The premier edition for the week ending March 4, 1974 featured actress Mia Farrow, then starring in the film "The Great Gatsby", on the cover. That issue also featured stories on Gloria Vanderbilt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the wives of U.S. Vietnam veterans who were Missing In Action. The magazine was, apart from its cover, printed in black-and-white. The initial cover price was 35 cents (). The core of the small founding editorial team included other editors, writers, photographers
The Adventures of Mao on the Long March large selection of unattributed quotes from various sources and parodies of certain writers, including Faulkner, Hemingway, and Kerouac. The story first appeared in 1969 in a 39-page condensed form in the magazine "Artist Slain". In 1970 the completed book was sent to various publishers and rejected as it was not considered a novel. Tuten considered self-publication and asked his friend Roy Lichtenstein to do the cover. Eventually, he was offered a publication deal by Citadel Press, on the condition that Lichtenstein make a lithograph of Mao for a deluxe edition (Lichtenstein's "Head of Mao" precedes Andy Warhol's Mao series by