William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) was the American publisher, editor, and proprietor--for almost half a century--of the most extensive journalistic empire ever assembled by one man.

On April 29, 1863, William Randolph Hearst was born in San Francisco. He received the best education that his coarse-grained, multimillionaire father and his refined, schoolteacher mother (more than 20 years her husband's junior) could buy: private tutors, private schools, grand tours of Europe, and Harvard College. Hearst inherited his father's ambition and energy, but neither his father's fortune nor need to make his own way in the world. George Hearst had amassed millions in mining properties, which he left, not to his son but to his wife--who compensated for his crass unfaithfulness by wantonly spoiling their only offspring.

Young Hearst's journalistic career began in 1887, two years after he was expelled from Harvard. "I want the San Francisco Examiner," he wrote his father, who owned the...