The Man Whose Name Is Synonymous with Journalism's
James McGrath Morris. Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power. New York: Harper, 2010. 576 pp. $29.99, cloth, ISBN 978-0-06-079869-7. Reviewed by David Bulla Published on Jhistory (September, 2010) Commissioned by Donna Harrington-Lueker (Salve Regina University) Joseph Pulitzer is one of the commanding nalism career in St. Louis right after the Civil War presences in American journalism history. U.S. and eventually published one of the two most mass communication historians include him powerful newspapers in the country. What makes among the nation’s most significant reporters, this biography work so well is how thoroughly columnists, editors, and owners--along with the Morris develops Pulitzer’s early years. A multilin‐ likes of James and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas gual Jew born in Mako, Hungary, on the eve of the Paine, Benjamin Franklin Bache, Horace Greeley, great nineteenth-century revolutions in Europe, James Gordon Bennett, William Randolph Hearst, Pulitzer came to the United States as a teenager in H. L. Mencken, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Lipp‐ the latter stages of the Civil War after his mer‐ mann, Walter Cronkite, Carl Bernstein and Robert chant father died, the family business went bank‐ Woodward, Rupert Murdoch, and Ted Turner, rupt, and his mother remarried. The journey from among others. While most on this list are known Hungarian teenager to American journalist had for a specific contribution to American journalism its challenges. First, he survived a six-week voy‐ (Bennett, for example, for making crime reporting age from Europe to New York. Then he lied about a staple of news reporting or Turner for the twen‐ his age (he was only seventeen and needed to be ty-four-hour-a-day news broadcast), Pulitzer, as at least eighteen to serve) and joined the Union author James McGrath Morris notes, is best army cavalry in August 1864 as a substitute for a known for the prize that bears his name.
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