Horace Greeley is one of the most discussed and memorable figures of nineteenth-century America. In his career as a journalist and editor for the New York Tribune and as a reformer promoting abolition and temperance, he used the power of his pen and his oratorical skills to inform and influence his audiences. As Don C. Seitz asserts in the foreword to his Horace Greeley: Founder of the New York Tribune (1926), "No rival American journalist ever created an influence that penetrated so deeply."

Perhaps the deepest impression Greeley made on American culture is his famous exhortation to "Go West, Young Man, go West"—a phrase he borrowed from an article in the Terre Haute Express. Greeley's advice concerned the future development of the country—its Manifest Destiny—and had nothing to do with becoming a tourist, for Greeley was more a worker than a traveler. His one book about...