The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst. Kenneth Whyte. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2009. 546 pp.

Why yet another biography (and a partial one at that) of the long-dead press titan? you ask. Surely we have enough already, for what could possibly be new or different in this one?

To begin with, this long biography focuses entirely upon a very short but crucial period—1895-1898, when Hearst moved from San Francisco to the news cauldron of New York City to compete fiercely with Joseph Pulitzer in what has come to be pejoratively known as newspapers’ period of “yellow” journalism. For another, Kenneth Whyte’s view is quite different from the accepted account, which dates to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane of 1941, W.A. Swanberg’s best selling Citizen Hearst (Scribners, 1961) published two decades later, and several more recent and well-received biographies.  [Read more...]