Like a fiery comet Joseph Pulitzer rocketed across the American newspaper world and changed the course of its history. Reporter, editor, publisher, he became the nation's greatest crusader against corruption, fought for and won our freedom of the press.

At seventeen, Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant, arrived in New York without money, without friends and without even a knowledge of English-he had come to join the Union Army to fight slavery. After the war he tried unsuccessfully to get a job in New York and then hitchhiked to St. Louis where he became a mule hostler, stevedore, waiter, messenger boy-anything to support himself while he studied for the law examinations which he passed at twenty-one.

Impressed by the young man's brilliance and determination, Carl Schurz, owner of the St. Louis Westliche Post, hired him as a reporter. Pulitzer's crisp, hard-hitting prose set a new style in news writing, and his insistence on unbiased reporting startled his employer as much as the city itself. As a gag his fellow reporters named him to run as a Republican state candidate in a Democratic district. He won, and what he learned in this battle sustained his headlong, never-satisfied search for the news behind the news.

He bought the run-down Post for its AP franchise, merged it with the Dispatch and created one of the strongest independent papers in the country. Leaving the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the charge of his competent editor, he moved his family to New York where he bought The World. After only two years he surpassed the circulations of the mighty Times, Tribune, Herald and Sun. Always there was the thrill of exposes, scoops, the flogging passion for truthful, unprejudiced news reporting, a policy of responsibility to the readers. And then at the height of his success, and still a young man, came overwhelming tragedy-he faced total blindness.

This is the dramatic story of an idealistic genius who shaped the pattern of present day journalism and who left a legacy to the journalists of tomorrow in the famous Pulitzer Prize Awards.

From the dust jacket