Joseph Pulitzer

Joseph Pulitzer was born in Hungary in 1847, came to America as a young man, and became one of the most powerful newspaper publishers in the country with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World. His circulation war with William Randolph Hearst helped create sensational yellow journalism, and in his will he left the money that founded Columbia's journalism school and the Pulitzer Prizes, first awarded in 1917.

His finest hour came in 1885. The Statue of Liberty had arrived and there was no money for the pedestal, so the World ran a daily campaign for donations, and in five months it announced $102,000 from about 120,000 donors, most of them giving less than a dollar. On our harbor walk you will hear the rest of that story on Liberty Island. On our Midtown walk, the Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army Plaza, paid for by his will, faces the gilded Sherman monument at the corner of Central Park.