Pulitzer

In the nineteenth century, when America became an industrial
giant and Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil,
Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Joseph Pulitzer
gave us the modern mass media. Ted Turner-like in his innovative
abilities, Teddy Roosevelt-like in his history-transforming power,
and Howard Hughes-like in his reclusive second half of his life as
a blind man tormented by sound, Pulitzer's tale provides all the elements of a life
story that is important, timely, and compelling.
-----Based on a wealth of previously unknown material--such as the unpublished
memoirs of Pulitzer's brother, formerly secret government documents, and
financial and business papers found in a St. Louis trash bin--Pulitzer: A Life in
Politics, Print, and Power is the first full-scale biography in more than a
generation of this seminal figure.
-----Pulitzer's lasting achievement was to transform American journalism into a
medium of mass consumption and immense influence. He accomplished this by
being the first media lord to recognize the vast social changes triggered by the
industrial revolution and by harnessing all the converging elements of
entertainment, technology, and business. As Americans left the farmlands and
became factory workers they gained leisure time, an appetite for entertainment,
and money to pay for it. The evolving new urban landscapes supplied a
pageantry of murder, mayhem, and titillation waiting to be exploited.
-----Adopting the techniques of mass entertainment made popular on Coney
Island and Broadway, Pulitzer filled his newspapers full of human-interest and
sensational stories harvested from urban life. He radically changed the entire
focus of news by reporting on matters relating directly to his readers. Each
edition of his newspapers brought a fresh assault on privilege and another
revelation of the squalor and oppression under which the new members of
laboring class toiled. In comparison to the other newspapers of the time with
their placid single-column headlines, it seemed as if the front page of Pulitzer's
newspapers screamed.
-----He offered this wonder for a penny or two, a price almost anyone could
afford. Upon this Pulitzer built circulation of the likes that had never been seen
before and offered American business a new way to reach consumers. Mass
entertainment, funded by mass advertisement, was born. Pulitzer made the
newspaper an essential item of urban life. He was the midwife at the birth of the
modern mass media that would simultaneously elevate the common man and take
his spare change to fuel corporate profits.
-----In doing so, Pulitzer accumulated immense power. He put one President in
the White House while another President sought to put him in prison; helped
prevent a war with England and stirred up one with Spain; sent Nellie Bly around
the globe and exposed corruption at home; saved the Statue of Liberty and
triggered long-lasting political, social, and economic reforms on behalf of the
downtrodden.
-----Pulitzer follows the dramatic journey of Pulitzer's life from his birth into a
Jewish family on the isolated plains of Hungary to the apex of American society.
Arriving as a Civil War mercenary, Pulitzer gained an education in the rough and
tumble world of immigrant politics and journalism before creating the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch that launched his career as a publisher. It eventually led to New
York where he took over the New York World and turned it into the most
powerful newspaper on the globe and an unabashed handmaiden of reform that
raised social consciousness and promoted a progressive-almost radical-political
agenda.

"Before there was Murdoch,
Berlusconi, Bloomberg, or
Hearst, there was Joseph
Pulitzer. This epic biography,
with its remarkable new
research and vivid, fast-paced
writing, will delight anyone
who wants to understand the
tangled history of politics and
the press in modern
America."

--Debby Applegate, winner
2007 Pulitzer Prize for The
Most Famous Man in
America: The Biography of
Henry Ward Beecher
________

"James McGrath Morris has
given us everything we could
have asked for in his new
biography of Joseph Pulitzer.
Gracefully written and
thoroughly researched, his
biography is easily the best
we have on this remarkable
man who so profoundly
influenced the worlds of
politics and publishing."

--David Nasaw, author of The
Chief: Life and Times of
William Randolph Hearst