No Ordinary Joe

by Daniel Pfaff

Overview

The widely known Pulitzer name is considered by many to be synonymous with the Pulitzer Prizes and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Joseph Pulitzer III (1913-1993) was editor and publisher of the Post-Dispatch, as were his father and grandfather before him. In No Ordinary Joe, Daniel W. Pfaff provides an insightful look at the life and career of Joseph Pulitzer III, using correspondence and records that were made available exclusively to the author. Pfaff also includes interviews with more than seventy individuals who knew and/or worked with Pulitzer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826265012
Publisher:	University of Missouri Press
Publication date:	12/01/2005
Series:	Missouri Biography , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	376
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	18 - 10 Years

About the Author

Daniel W. Pfaff is Professor Emeritus of Journalism at Penn State University. Author of Joseph Pulitzer II and the Post-Dispatch: A Newspaperman’s Life, he lives in State College, Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

	Sources and Acknowledgments	ix
	Abbreviations	xiii
	Introduction	1
1	Growing Up	7
2	Harvard	22
3	Executive Apprentice	36
4	Wartime	51
5	Associate Editor	60
6	Succession	89
7	Michael Edgar Pulitzer	103
8	The Pulitzers and the Newhouses	117
9	J. P. IV: Starting Out	136
10	The Family Fight	149
11	J. P. IV: "There Are No Dynasties"	191
12	Managing Editors	208
13	The Page	231
14	Running the Business	253
15	Patron of the Arts	270
16	Prizes and Principles	282
17	With Family and Friends	295
18	Giving Good Measure	312
19	Epilogue	323
	Selected Bibliography	349
	Index	351

Editorial Reviews

Pfaff (Joseph Pulitzer II and the Post-Dispatch, 1991) paints a beauty-marks-and-all portrait of the least consequential Pulitzer. Even as he began his 31-year reign as editor/publisher of the staunchly liberal St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Joseph Pulitzer III confronted a media landscape vastly different from the one dominated by his father and even more famous grandfather. Through his financial strategies, diversification into television and cautious stewardship, he managed to keep his family's empire intact. Otherwise, it's difficult to see how anything other than his last name, connoting as it does the very best (the Prize) and the very worst (the yellow) in journalism, recommends him for inclusion in the discussion of great newspapermen. Born to privilege, educated at all the right schools (St. Marks, Harvard), at home in the usual playgrounds of the wealthy (Paris, Zermatt, Bar Harbor), Pulitzer appears to have resignedly entered the family business. Left to his own inclinations, it's likely his knowledge of and passion for art-even as a youth he had a discerning eye, and his wealth enabled him to become an early collector of Picasso, Klee, Mondrian and other modern masters-might have led to a more genuinely accomplished, if more modest, career. Pfaff (Emeritus, Journalism/Penn State Univ.) attempts to persuade us that Pulitzer was other than the ordinarily competent, self-absorbed, aloof, humorless fellow who emerges here, but the author relies principally on interview subjects who owe their lives, fortune, career or portions of their soul to Joe III. Almost completely devoid of the common touch, a not unimportant quality in a newspaperman, he reached his 60s before experiencing thenovelty of a bus ride. Charming. The mini-portraits of the paper's four managing and four editorial-page editors constitute the book's strongest section. Only followers of the fortunes of 20th-century media companies or the most devoted students of journalism will warm to Joe himself.

Kirkus Reviews