Pulitzer, Joseph

Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911), an impoverished immigrant, became the multimillionaire owner and editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World. A champion of investigative reporting, he used his newspapers to expose tax and business fraud and the housing and labor conditions of New York's underclass.

The eldest son of a Hungarian Jewish father and Catholic mother, Pulitzer enjoyed a privileged upbringing until his father died. His mother remarried a man that Pulitzer hated, and wishing to escape him, Pulitzer immigrated to the United States. After a year of service with the United States Union Army, Pulitzer moved to New York, where he was so penniless that he slept on a park bench. Though well educated and fluent in three languages, Pulitzer's English was poor. Unable to find work in New York, he decided to relocate to St. Louis, Missouri.

[Page 631]In St. Louis, Pulitzer took any job he could find: deckhand, laborer, hack driver, and waiter. In addition to working two jobs, 16 hours a day, Pulitzer spent 4 hours at the library studying English. His big break came when he wrote about a scam he had been subjected to for the influential German-language paper Westliche Post. His energy, intelligence, and knack for telling a story caught the eye of the editor, who began to give him regular writing assignments. Remarkably driven and disciplined, Pulitzer also studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1868. He became an American citizen in 1867.

When Pulitzer attended a Republican Party meeting in 1869 for his job as a reporter, he was unexpectedly nominated as their candidate for Missouri state senator. He won the election and took office at age 21. After his term was complete, he practiced law and married Kate Davis, with whom he had five children.

Pulitzer's wide-ranging and highly successful career in newspapers began at the German Post, where he became co-owner and managing editor in 1872. His next venture was the purchase of the dying St. Louis Dispatch in 1878, for which he paid $2,500. In 1883, by which time Pulitzer was quite wealthy, he purchased the New York World for $346,000. Pulitzer turned the newspaper, which had been losing $40,000 a year, into a human-interest journal that published scandal and sensational stories. By 1885, the World was the largest circulating paper in the country, owing partly to the skilled contributors that Pulitzer recruited, including Richard F. Outcault, a cartoonist, and Nellie Bly, a pioneer of investigative reporting, who wrote articles on the poverty and labor conditions in New York.

In 1890, when Pulitzer was only 43, he withdrew from the editorship of the World because of poor eye-sight, but he continued to manage the editorial and financial concerns of his papers. For the rest of his life, Pulitzer promoted investigative journalism. When he died in 1911, he left $2 million for the founding of Columbia University's School of Journalism and the Pulitzer Prizes.