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.

James McGrath Morris is the author of The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism, which was selected as a Washington Post Best Book of 2004. He is the editor of the monthly Biographer's Craft, and his writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Observer, and the Baltimore Sun.