Joseph Pulitzer – 1847-1911

Born in Hungary, Pulitzer immigrated to the United States in 1864 to fight in the Civil War. He became a Germanlanguage reporter after the war, bought into the St. Louis paper for which he worked, sold his share at a profit, and repeated the process with another paper. By 1878, he was publishing the city’s most important (English-language) daily, and in 1883 he moved to New York, where he purchased the World and transformed it into the city’s leading paper. Pulitzer engaged in a fierce circulation war with rival William Randolph Hearst in the late 1890s, giving rise to the era of “yellow journalism.” Pulitzer established many of the practices of modern journalism. He posthumously endowed the Columbia University School of Journalism and the Pulitzer Prize for excellence in journalism and other creative fields.