William Randolph Hearst

From Chapter 1: At rare intervals, in human experience, arises an individual of such towering ability and diversified talents as to assume not only leadership but domination of his chosen field. Such an individual was William Randolph Hearst. This phenomenal American placed his stamp upon world journalism as has no other, before or since. William Randolph Hearst evolved new technique in newspaper making, strikingly synchronizing his type, his text and his illustrations. An artist to his finder tips, he succeeded in challenging and arresting the attention of the eye and of the mind, achieving effects hitherto unattempted. His methods have been so widely imitated and so universally adopted that the originator has been all but lost sight of. Hearst's active career spanned two-thirds of a century, his life one-half that of his country. It was typical of him that he should have died in harness, a pad and pencil at his bedside. For, in all the triumphs and defeats and backwashed and vicissitudes of the crowded decades, Mr. Hearst took the fiercest pride in calling himself a working newspaper man. "If I had my life to live over again," he once remarked, "I would be a newspaper man, and merely try to be a better one." It is a matchless journalist that posterity will best remember him.--page 1.