W. A. Swanberg

Book Description: An exhaustive profile of the nation's most powerful newspaper mogul explores the life and times of William Randolph Hearst, his turbulent and flamboyant personal life, his controversial style of journalism, and the growth of his publishing empire.

It began quietly enough one morning in February 1880, with a mutton-chopped Acme Safe Company salesman knocking on the door of Reverend Morgan Dix, the starchiest clergyman in Manhattan's most respectable church. The salesman was surely misdirected, Reverend Dix explained, he had no need for a safe, and he had not made an appointment. But soon after, used clothes dealers arrived, followed by heavy machinery salesmen, and soon the street filled riotously with wave after wave of solicitor-tormentors, hundreds of funeral directors, horse traders, wigmakers, fellow clergymen, doctors, all insisting they'd been summoned by the bewildered Reverend Dix. And for weeks, it continued in this manner. Reporters from every newspaper in New York camped out to watch the fun, and as the story gained national attention, police and postal officers raced to capture the gleeful prankster-cum-performance artist who was making a mockery of the esteemed Trinity Church.

Life and times of an American railroad capitalist and speculator, 1834-1872.

The making of the fortune of William Collins Whitney and the social consciousness of his daughter, Dorothy, are examined in a saga of love, money, politics, corruption, ambition, and untimely death.

Henry Robinson Luce - the child of American missionaries in China, a man obsessed by God, became a millionaire at thirty and used his innovative journalistic genius to create a publishing empire.