Joseph Pulitzer

Hello! My name is Joseph Pulitzer. I want to tell you my story, which started a long, long way from America. I was born on April 10th, 1847, in a country called Hungary. As a boy, I was full of big dreams, and my biggest dream was to go to America. When I was 17 years old, in 1864, I finally made the long journey across the ocean. I didn't have much money and couldn't speak English very well, but I had a strong will to work hard and make a new life for myself.

After arriving in America, I moved to a city called St. Louis, Missouri. Life was tough at first, and I took any job I could find to get by. One day, I started working as a reporter for a German-language newspaper, and I discovered that I loved it. I found a passion for uncovering important stories and writing them for everyone to read. I firmly believed that newspapers should be for everybody, not just for wealthy people. This idea guided me, and in 1878, I bought my own newspaper. I combined it with another to create the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a paper that promised to serve the people and tell the truth.

My ideas about making news for everyone were popular, and soon I was ready for a bigger challenge. In 1883, I moved to New York City and bought a newspaper called the New York World. I wanted to make the news exciting and easy to understand for all kinds of people, from factory workers to new immigrants who were just learning English. I filled the newspaper's pages with thrilling stories, investigations into powerful people who weren't being fair, and lots of pictures and comics. This was a new idea back then, and it worked. My newspaper became the most widely read in the entire country.

One of my proudest moments came in 1885. The country of France had given America a wonderful gift: the Statue of Liberty. But there was a big problem. The giant copper statue needed a stone pedestal to stand on, but there was no money to build it. I knew I had to do something. I used my newspaper to ask all of my readers for help. I promised to print the name of every single person who donated, even a child who sent in just a few pennies. Together, through small donations from thousands of people, we raised all the money needed to give Lady Liberty her permanent home in New York Harbor.

I always believed that good journalism—honest and brave reporting—could make the world a better place. As I got older, my eyesight began to fail, but my vision for the future of news never did. I lived to be 64 years old. In my will, I left money to create a special school for journalists at Columbia University. I also left money to establish a set of awards for the very best work in writing, reporting, and music. The first Pulitzer Prizes were given out in 1917. Today, they are still one of the greatest honors a writer or journalist can receive, all because of a dream that started long ago in Hungary.