Like Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than for his contribution to history.  Yet, in nineteenth-century industrial America, while Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil, Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Pulitzer ushered in the modern mass media.

James McGrath Morris traces the epic story of this Jewish Hungarian immigrant's rise through American politics and into journalism where he accumulated immense power and wealth, only to fall blind and become a lonely, tormented recluse wandering the globe - but not before Pulitzer transformed American journalism and politics forever.