NEXT week, for the 30th time since 1928, our cover will show the person chosen by the editors as Man of the Year. As most readers know, TIME's choice is based not on a popularity poll but on a single criterion: Who did the most in the year to affect the news for good or ill?

This year, as usual, many of you nominated your own candidates (see LETTERS). Among the nominees: Billy Graham, Governor Faubus, Laika, Jonas Salk, President Eisenhower, Bert and Harry Piel, Khrushchev, Nobel Prizewinner Lester Pearson, Mike Todd and two, symbolic nominees, the scientist and the American Negro.

TIME's first Man of the Year, young Charles Lindbergh, soloed across the Atlantic sky and opened the Air Age. Lindbergh's profile was followed by a gallery of men and women who somehow shaped the news for better or worse. Included were Franklin Roosevelt, Walter P. Chrysler, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and General Eisenhower.

In 1945 the Man of the Year story contained this passage: "What the world would best remember in 1945 was the deadly mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here were the force, the threat, the promise of the future. In their giant shadows, 45,000 ft. tall, all men were pygmies." The cover showed a small face of Harry Truman, a man caught and dwarfed by the might of the new Atomic Age.

Since then, as before, TIME's Man of the Year has often symbolized powerful human effort in the age-old will to freedom. In 1949 Winston Churchill was chosen Man of the Half Century with these words: "That a free world survived in 1950 . . . was due in large measure to his exertions." Last year, as the battle flared in Central Europe, the Man of the Year was a nameless, single-minded Hungarian Freedom Fighter.

For the editors' choice of Man of 1957, see next week's TIME.

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