Vanity Fair Essay Contest Probes the Minds of Today's Youth

A trip to Italy is in store for the writer who wins Vanity Fair Magazine's annual essay contest.

Entries must address the following topic: "What is on the minds of America's youth today?" and submissions must be received by Sept. 30th.

Essays should be emailed to EssayContest@vf.com as a Microsoft Word document or an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. The text area of the submission email must state the entrant's full name, address, date of birth, and phone number and no purchase is necessary to win. Essays with either one or two authors are eligible.

Winning essays will be selected based on the quality of writing, clarity, effectiveness, and originality of the argument. The grand prize winning entry will appear online at vanityfair.com; receive $15,000, a week at a writer's retreat in Tuscany, and a Montblanc pen. There will be one second prize of $5,000 and a Montblanc Boheme fountain pen, and one third prize of $1,000 and a Montblanc StarWalker Fine Liner. In the event that a co-authored essay wins any of the three prizes, the prize money will be split equally between the two authors and each one will receive the specified Montblanc pen. If a co-authored essay wins the grand prize, both writers will be allowed to take the trip to Italy.

Quality of writing will count for 50 percent, clarity for 20, effectiveness for 20, and originality for ten percent and essays will be judged by magazine staff and/or other qualified writing professionals. Contest winners will be announced on or before June 20th and potential winners may be notified by mail, phone, or email in advance of the announcement. The trip to Donnini, Italy includes economy-class airfare and six nights of accommodations at the Santa Maddalena writers' colony.

The sponsor of the contest is Mountblanc based in New Jersey.

An international edition of Vanity Fair (printed in English and containing most of the contents that appear in the U.S. version) is published monthly out of London and distributed worldwide. Vanity Fair also has a summer internship program for students organized through Conde Nast Human Resources.

Seventy-five years ago Vanity Fair covered such young people as the late Ginger Rogers who at 18 played the legendary Mollie Gray in the original "Girl Crazy" on Broadway.

"Vanity fair" originally meant a place of ostentation or empty, idle amusement and frivolity, a reference to the decadent fair in John Bunyan's 1678 book The Pilgrim's Progress, according to Vanity Fair's website. The magazine crossed over from fiction to journalism in 1860 with a first issue of a British periodical bearing the name. In 1913 the publisher, Conde Nast, having already made a success of Vogue, brought the rights to the name and introduced a new hybrid journal, Dress and Vanity Fair which had a four-issue run. Vanity Fair was resurrected a half-century later in 1983 as a quirky, cultural magazine. In 1982, Graydon Carter, a veteran of Time and Life Magazines, co-founder of Spy, and editor of the New York Observer, took over Vanity Fair bringing it to new levels of prowess and profitability, according to vf.com.

In 1914 Vanity Fair's editor Frank Crowninshield was quoted as saying, "The secret is out. Take a dozen or so cultivated men and women, dress them becomingly; sit them down to dinner. What will these people say? Vanity Fair is that dinner!"

According to Mori, a public opinion research agency, youth are an increasingly important audience, not only as consumers in their own right but as opinion formers, in particular their influence on the family unit, and their parents' attitudes and purchasing behavior. And author John Lienhard said young people today know more than their parents did at the same age.

For names of Vanity Fair contest winners, send an email requesting the winners' list to EssayContest@vf.com.