My highlights from the book:

1. Joseph Pulitzer was the midwife to the birth of the modern mass media. Pulitzer’s lasting achievement was to transform American journalism into a medium of mass consumption and immense influence.

2. Pulitzer never relaxed his grip on the World, his influential New York newspaper that had ushered in the modern era of mass communications. 

3. Since becoming blind at the apex of his rise to the top, Pulitzer suffered from insomnia as well as numerous other real and imagined ailments, and was tormented by even the smallest sound. 

4. The no-holds-barred attitude of the World put the newspapers into a spiraling descent of sensationalism and outright fabrications.

5. Before he reached his teenage years, he would lose a parent and all but one of his eight siblings. Death would be the most constant element of family life.

6. When disciplining his three boys, their father terrified them by recounting the Roman historian Livy’s tale of Titus Manlius who decapitated his own son for defending the family’s honor in battle because he had not first sought his father’s permission. 

7. If Joseph didn’t take well to formal instruction, he succumbed to the pleasures of reading. He favored reading works of history and biography. 

8. His father’s death created a financial nightmare. 

9. He described himself as a “poor orphan who never even enjoyed as much of a luxury as a father.”

10. “Are you going to America?” “Yes,” said Pulitzer. “I must go because my mother cannot support us and here there is no work.”

11. To meet the quota [for soldiers in The American Civil War], a group of wealth Bostonians looked eastward for able bodies. They wagered that there were thousands of young men in Europe who would join the American military provided their passage could be paid. The scheme became Pulitzer’s escape route. 

12. Describing how he came to the United States: I was friendless, homeless, tongueless, and guideless.

13. Never in my life did I have a more trying task. The man who has not cared for 16 mules does not know what work and trouble are. 

14. A library could offer lectures, concerts, and classes for '“mutual improvement,” then considered the path of social and economic elevation. Pulizter paid the $2 initiation fee and $3 annual dues. 

15. Pulitzer spent every free moment he had at the library, bringing a pair of apples for sustenance so as not to waste a moment leaving for a meal.

16. For a beginner, he was exasperatingly inquisitive. 

17. He was so industrious that he became a positive annoyance to others who felt less inclined to work. 

18. Pulitzer was unwilling to put forward anything but his best effort. 

19. The world into which Pulitzer peeked seemed to be one with limitless possibilities. To be a newspaper editor was to do more than report on the world; it was to shape it. 

20. Pulitzer’s ambition did not go unnoticed. “There never seemed to be any doubt in his mind that he would succeed in something.” 

21. It was not uncommon for him to use language in a heated dispute that went beyond the limit. I cautioned him that he must become more conservative and forbearing for fear that he might someday meet a person like himself and then there would be trouble. 

22. In only 5 years he had grown from a bounty hunting Hungarian teenager to an American lawmaker. 

23. Pulitzer withdrew his pistol and fired. “I mashed his head against the baseboard of the room, and tried to get the pistol out of his hand,” Augustine said. 

24. They thought I was necessary to the paper. They probably would have done the same thing to any other man who worked sixteen hours a day, as I did.

25. Seven years after reading his first copy of the paper in hopes of finding employment in St. Louis, Pulitzer was an American newspaper publisher. 

26. Pulitzer entered a barren stretch. He was twenty-eight years old. He had no definite profession. A sense of failure hung over him.

27. For Joseph—now thirty, and with no specific profession or even a home—such introspection was demoralizing. 

28. His mind constantly churned with political and business schemes.

29. His business acumen drove him. Although he was at times and innovator in journalism, this was not his strength. Rather, he possessed remarkable foresight and had an uncanny ability to recognize value where others didn’t. He was willing to take risks based on his insights when others remained timid. 

30. He demanded precise information. Exactly how many copies were printed the day before? Sold? Returned? How were street sales of the paper? How many lines of advertising had run in the last issue? During the last week? Since the beginning of the year? How much money was spent on the staff? For paper? For telegraphs? How much money was taken in? His thirst for details was insatiable. 

31. He honed his questioning down to a precise mix of queries yielding a statistical portrait that revealed in a single glance where things stood. Until the end of his life, he would never give up this habit. 

32. Despite the paper’s progress toward financial stability, Pulitzer did not relax or let up.

33. In an era when the printed word ruled supreme and 1,028 newspapers competed for readers, content was the means of competition. The medium was not the message; the message was. This is where Pulitzer started. 

34. Pulitzer wanted illustrations in the World. On newsstands and in the arms of newsboys, the gray, unbroken front pages of the city’s newspapers were indistinguishable from each other. He found every excuse possible to add illustrations to make his paper stand out. 

35. “A great many people in the world require to be educated through the eyes,” Pulitzer said, mindful that many of the readers he pursued were struggling to learn English. 

36. Pulitzer was extremely ambitious. He was not satisfied to be the 500th best newspaper. He wanted to be number 1.  

37. The paper now sold more than a quarter of a million copies each day. 

38. The success of the World was now so widely known that it was spawning imitators in other cities. William Randolph Hearst set about transforming the Examiner into the West Coast version of the World. For years Hearst had read, studied, and cut out articles from the World.

39. We must recognize the extraordinary competition, no doubt, but we must also recognize extraordinary foolishness, not imitate it. 

40. When we think that, a hundred years hence, not one of us now living will be alive to care or to know, to enjoy or to suffer, what does it all amount to? To a puff of smoke which makes a few rings and then disappears into nothingness and yet we make tragedies of our lives, most of us not even making them serious comedies.

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