Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power
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Like Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than for his contribution to history. Yet, in nineteenth-century industrial America, while Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil, Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Pulitzer ushered in the modern mass media. James McGrath Morris traces the epic story of this Jewish Hungarian immigrant's rise through American politics and into journalism where he accumulated immense power and wealth, only to fall blind and become a lonely, tormented recluse wandering the globe. But not before Pulitzer transformed American journalism into a medium of mass consumption and immense influence. As the first media baron to recognize the vast social changes of the industrial revolution, he harnessed all the converging elements of entertainment, technology, business, and demographics, and made the newspaper an essential feature of urban life. Pulitzer used his influence to advance a progressive political agenda and his power to fight those who opposed him. The course he followed led him to battle Theodore Roosevelt who, when President, tried to send Pulitzer to prison. The grueling legal battles Pulitzer endured for freedom of the press changed the landscape of American newspapers and politics. Based on years of research and newly discovered documents, Pulitzer is a classic, magisterial biography and a gripping portrait of an American icon. The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley …[an] excellent book: a thorough, possibly definitive biography of the man who shaped the modern newspaper more than anyone else…There have been other biographies of Pulitzer, most notably W.A. Swanberg's published in 1967, but James McGrath Morris's is the best. It is authoritative, lucid and fair to its complicated subject, and it draws upon a certain amount of "items previously unavailable to other biographers," most notably an unpublished memoir by Pulitzer's younger brother, Albert, and love letters to Pulitzer's wife, Kate, from a noted journalist with whom she had a brief but apparently passionate affair. The first of these tells us a bit more about Pulitzer's boyhood, and the second simply adds a bit of juice to his story.
Prologue: Havana 1909 1Pt. I 1847-18781 Hungary 92 Boots and Saddles 203 The Promised Land 294 Politics and Journalism 435 Politics and Gunpowder 566 Left Behind 707 Politics and Rebellion 808 Politics and Principle 959 Founding Father 11110 Fraud and His Fraudulency 12411 Nannie and Kate 138Pt. II 1878-188812 A Paper of His Own 14913 Success 16214 Dark Lantern 17515 St. Louis Grows Small 19016 The Great Theater 20417 Kingmaker 22118 Raising Liberty 23319 A Blind Croesus 248Pt. III 1888-191120 Samson Agonistes 26921 Darkness 28422 Caged Eagle 29923 Trouble from the West 31924 Yellow 33725 The Great God Success 34926 Fleeing His Shadow 36127 Captured for the Ages 38328 Forever Unsatisfied 39929 Clash of Titans 41730 A Short Remaining Span 44131 Softly, Very Softly 456Acknowledgments 465Notes 471Bibliography 531Index 537
