Joseph Pulitzer was born in the village of Mako, near Buda Pesth in Hungary, on April 10, 1847.  His father was a Jew, his mother a Christian.  At the age of sixteen he emigrated to the United States.  He landed without friends, without money, unable to speak a word of English.  He enlisted immediately in the First New York (Lincoln) Cavalry Regiment, a regiment chiefly composed of Germans and in which German was the prevailing tongue.

Within a year the Civil War ended, and Pulitzer found himself, in common with hundreds of thousands of others, out of employment at a time when employment was most difficult to secure.  At this time he was so poor that he was turned away from French’s Hotel for lack of fifty cents with which to pay for his bed.  In less than twenty years he bought French’s Hotel, pulled it down, and erected in its place the Pulitzer Building, at that time one of the largest business buildings in New York, where he housed The World.

What lay between these two events may be summed up in a few words.  At the close of the Civil War Mr. Pulitzer went to St. Louis, and in 1868, after being engaged in various occupations, he became a reporter on the Westliche Post.  In less than ten years he was editor and part proprietor.  His amazing energy, his passionate interest in politics, his rare gift of terse and forcible expression, and his striking personality carried him over or through all obstacles.

After he had purchased the St. Louis Dispatch, amalgamated it with the Post, and made the Post-Dispatch a profitable business enterprise and a power to be reckoned with in politics, he felt the need of a wider field in which to maneuver the forces of his character and his intellect.

He came to New York in 1883 and purchased The World from Jay Gould.  At that time The World had a circulation of less than twelve thousand copies a day, and was practically bankrupt.  From this time forward Mr. Pulitzer concentrated his every faculty on building up The World.  He was scoffed at, ridiculed, and abused by the most powerful editors of the old school.  They were to learn, not without bitterness and wounds, that opposition was the one fuel of all others which best fed the triple flame of his courage, his tenacity, and his resourcefulness.

Four years of unremitting toil produced two results.  The World reached a circulation of two hundred thousand copies a day and took its place in the front rank of the American press as a journal of force and ability, and Joseph Pulitzer left New York, a complete nervous wreck, to face in solitude the knowledge that he would never read print again and that within a few years he would be totally blind.

Joseph Pulitzer, as I knew him twenty-four years after he had been driven from active life by the sudden and final collapse of his health, was a man who could be judged by no common standards, for his feelings, his temper, and his point of view had been warped by years of suffering.