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Born in Pennsylvania in 1864, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane took the pen-name of Nellie Bly from the title character in a popular song when she began to write for the newspapers.

A daring foreign correspondent in Mexico when she was barely out of her teens, Nellie went on to greater renown when she went undercover as a patient in a New York lunatic asylum and revealed the cruel neglect with which the mentally ill were treated. Her book, Ten Days in a Madhouse, published when she was 23, became a bestseller.

Nellie's greatest fame came two years later when she set out to emulate Phileas Fogg and journey around the world in 80 days. Her despatches to the New York World as she travelled the globe were read by millions. She gave up journalism at the age of 30 to marry and died 30 years later in New York.
Answered by Nick Rennison.

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Born in Pennsylvania in 1864, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane took the pen-name of Nellie Bly from the title character in a popular song when she began to write for the newspapers.

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Investigative journalist Nellie Bly was one of the foremost female journalists of the 19th century. She became famous for feigning mental illness to gain admission to a mental hospital to expose how patients were treated. Learn more about her on womenshistory.org.

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Frederick Douglass stood at the podium, trembling with nervousness. Before him sat abolitionists who had travelled to the Massachusetts island of Nantucket. Only 23 years old at the time, Douglass overcame his nervousness and gave a stirring, eloquent speech about his life as a slave. Douglass would continue to give speeches for the rest of his life and would become a leading spokesperson for the abolition of slavery and for racial equality.

The son of a slave woman and an unknown white man, "Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey" was born in February of 1818 on Maryland's eastern shore. He spent his early years with his grandparents and with an aunt, seeing his mother only four or five times before her death when he was seven. (All Douglass knew of his father was that he was white.) During this time he was exposed to the degradations of slavery, witnessing firsthand brutal whippings and spending much time cold and hungry. When he was eight he was sent to Baltimore to live with a ship carpenter named Hugh Auld. There he learned to read and first heard the words abolition and abolitionists. "Going to live at Baltimore," Douglass would later say, "laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity."

Douglass spent seven relatively comfortable years in Baltimore before being sent back to the country, where he was hired out to a farm run by a notoriously brutal "slavebreaker" named Edward Covey. And the treatment he received was indeed brutal. Whipped daily and barely fed, Douglass was "broken in body, soul, and spirit."

On January 1, 1836, Douglass made a resolution that he would be free by the end of the year. He planned an escape. But early in April he was jailed after his plan was discovered. Two years later, while living in Baltimore and working at a shipyard, Douglass would finally realize his dream: he fled the city on September 3, 1838. Travelling by train, then steamboat, then train, he arrived in New York City the following day. Several weeks later he had settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, living with his newlywed bride (whom he met in Baltimore and married in New York) under his new name, Frederick Douglass.

Always striving to educate himself, Douglass continued his reading. He joined various organizations in New Bedford, including a black church. He attended Abolitionists' meetings. He subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison's weekly journal, the Liberator. In 1841, he saw Garrison speak at the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society's annual meeting. Douglass was inspired by the speaker, later stating, "no face and form ever impressed me with such sentiments [the hatred of slavery] as did those of William Lloyd Garrison." Garrison, too, was impressed with Douglass, mentioning him in the Liberator. Several days later Douglass gave his speech at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's annual convention in Nantucket-- the speech described at the top of this page. Of the speech, one correspondent reported, "Flinty hearts were pierced, and cold ones melted by his eloquence." Before leaving the island, Douglass was asked to become a lecturer for the Society for three years. It was the launch of a career that would continue throughout Douglass' long life.

Despite apprehensions that the information might endanger his freedom, Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself. The year was 1845. Three years later, after a speaking tour of England, Ireland, and Scotland, Douglass published the first issue of the North Star, a four-page weekly, out of Rochester, New York.

Ever since he first met Garrison in 1841, the white abolitionist leader had been Douglass' mentor. But the views of Garrison and Douglass ultimately diverged. Garrison represented the radical end of the abolitionist spectrum. He denounced churches, political parties, even voting. He believed in the dissolution (break up) of the Union. He also believed that the U.S. Constitution was a pro-slavery document. After his tour of Europe and the establishment of his paper, Douglass' views began to change; he was becoming more of an independent thinker, more pragmatic. In 1851 Douglass announced at a meeting in Syracuse, New York, that he did not assume the Constitution was a pro-slavery document, and that it could even "be wielded in behalf of emancipation," especially where the federal government had exclusive jurisdiction. Douglass also did not advocate the dissolution of the Union, since it would isolate slaves in the South. This led to a bitter dispute between Garrison and Douglass that, despite the efforts of others such as Harriet Beecher Stowe to reconcile the two, would last into the Civil War.

Frederick Douglass would continue his active involvement to better the lives of African Americans. He conferred with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and recruited northern blacks for the Union Army. After the War he fought for the rights of women and African Americans alike.

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Frederick Douglass stood at the podium, trembling with nervousness. Before him sat abolitionists who had travelled to the Massachusetts island of Nantucket. Only 23 years old at the time, Douglass overcame his nervousness and gave a stirring, eloquent speech about his life as a slave.

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Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in February 1818. Enslavers often ripped apart or fractured family relationships. Young Frederick barely knew his mother, who died when he was a young child on a distant forced labor camp. He never knew his father. When he turned eight years old, his enslaver forced him to work for a family in Baltimore.

At an early age, Frederick realized there was a connection between literacy and freedom. Not allowed to attend school, he taught himself to read and write in the streets of Baltimore. At twelve, he bought a book called The Columbian Orator. It was a collection of revolutionary speeches, debates, and writings on natural rights.

When Frederick was fifteen, his enslaver sent him back to the Eastern Shore to labor as a fieldhand. Frederick rebelled intensely. He educated other enslaved individuals, physically fought back against a "slave-breaker," and attempted to seize his freedom through a bold, but ultimately unsuccessful plan.

Frustrated, his enslaver returned him to Baltimore. This time, Frederick met a young free Black woman named Anna Murray. Anna Murray used her money to buy him a train ticket, risking her own safety to help him seize his freedom. On September 3, 1838, with the ticket in hand, he boarded a northbound train dressed as a sailor. In less than 24 hours, Frederick arrived in New York City. His lifelong search for freedom was well underway.

After seeking freedom, Frederick and Anna were married. They decided that with the human traffickers in New York City, it was not a safe place for Frederick, so they settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. There, they adopted the last name "Douglass" and started their family. The family grew to include five children: Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick, Jr., Charles, and Annie.

After finding employment as a laborer, Douglass began to attend abolitionist meetings and speak about his experiences. He soon gained a reputation as an orator, and was paid to speak about slavery by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. This took him on speaking tours across the North and Midwest.

Douglass's fame as an orator increased as he traveled. Still, some of his audiences suspected he had never been enslaved. In 1845, he published his first autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, to lay those doubts to rest. The narrative gave a clear record of names and places from his enslavement.

To avoid being captured and re-enslaved, Douglass traveled overseas. For almost two years, he gave speeches and sold copies of his narrative in England, Ireland, and Scotland. When abolitionists offered to purchase his freedom, Douglass accepted and returned home to the United States legally free. The Douglass family relocated to Rochester, New York.

In Rochester, Douglass took his work in new directions. He embraced the women's rights movement, helped people on the Underground Railroad, and supported anti-slavery political parties. Once an ally of William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, Douglass started to work more closely with Gerrit Smith and John Brown. He bought a printing press and ran his own newspaper, The North Star. In 1855, he published his second autobiography, . My Bondage and My Freedom, which expanded on his first autobiography and challenged racial segregation in the North

In 1861, the nation erupted into civil war over the issue of slavery. Frederick Douglass worked tirelessly to make sure that emancipation would be one of the war's outcomes. He recruited Black men to fight in the U.S. Army, including two of his own sons, who served in the famous 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. When Black troops protested they were not receiving pay and treatment equal to that of white troops, Douglass met with President Abraham Lincoln to advocate on their behalf.

As the Civil War progressed and emancipation seemed imminent, Douglass intensified the fight for equal citizenship. He argued that freedom would be empty if the formerly enslaved were not guaranteed the rights and protections of American citizens. A series of postwar amendments sought to make some of these tremendous changes. The 13th Amendment (ratified in 1865) abolished slavery, the 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868) granted national birthright citizenship, and the 15th Amendment (ratified in 1870) stated nobody could be denied voting rights on the basis of race, skin color, or previous servitude.

In 1872, the Douglasses moved to Washington, D.C. There were multiple reasons for their move. Douglass had been traveling frequently to the area ever since the Civil War. All three of their sons already lived in the federal district, and the old family home in Rochester had burned. A widely known public figure by the time of Reconstruction, Douglass started to hold prestigious offices, including assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission, legislative council member of the D.C. Territorial Government, board member of Howard University, and president of the Freedman's Bank.

After the fall of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass managed to retain high-ranking federal appointments. He served under five presidents as U.S. Marshal for D.C. (1877-1881), Recorder of Deeds for D.C. (1881-1886), and Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti (1889-1891). Significantly, he held these positions at a time when violence and fraud severely restricted Black political activism.

On top of his federal work, Douglass kept a vigorous speaking tour schedule. His speeches continued to agitate for racial equality and women's rights. In 1881, Douglass published his third autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which took a long view of his life's work, the nation's progress, and the work left to do. Although the nation had made great strides during Reconstruction, there was still injustice and a basic lack of freedom for many Americans due to " Jim Crow" laws (so-called after a Black character in minstrel shows).

Tragedy struck Douglass's life in 1882 when Anna Murray Douglass died from a stroke. He remarried in 1884 to Helen Pitts, an activist and the daughter of former abolitionists. The marriage stirred controversy, as Helen was white and twenty years younger than him. Part of their married life was spent abroad. They traveled to Europe and Africa in 1886-1887, and they took up temporary residence in Haiti during Douglass's service there in 1889-1891.

On February 20, 1895, Douglass attended a meeting for the National Council of Women. He returned home to Cedar Hill in the late afternoon and was preparing to give a speech at a local church when he suffered a heart attack and passed away. Douglass was 77. He had remained a central figure in the fight for equality and justice for his entire life.

View the chronology of the life of Frederick Douglass here.

As a young woman, Anna Murray helped Frederick Bailey escape from slavery. They adopted the name "Douglass" after marrying.

This list of works by and about Frederick Douglass will help you brush up on your knowledge.

After Frederick Douglass passed away, his second wife Helen preserved Cedar Hill as a historic house museum.

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Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

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Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in February 1818. Enslavers often ripped apart or fractured family relationships. Young Frederick barely knew his mother, who died when he was a young child on a distant forced labor camp. He never knew his father.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Lost Generation, a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term is also used more generally to refer to the post-World War I generation.

The generation was "lost" in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienation from a United States that, basking under Pres. Warren G. Harding's "back to normalcy" policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the 1920s. They were never a literary school.

Gertrude Stein is credited for the term Lost Generation, though Hemingway made it widely known. According to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (1964), she had heard it used by a garage owner in France, who dismissively referred to the younger generation as a "génération perdue." In conversation with Hemingway, she turned that label on him and declared, "You are all a lost generation." He used her remark as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar Paris.

In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions, their works lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period. The last representative works of the era were Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934) and Dos Passos's The Big Money (1936).

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

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Lost Generation | Definition, Writers, Characteristics, Books, & Facts

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Lost Generation, a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term is also used more generally to refer to the post-World War I generation. Learn more about the Lost Generation in this article.

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Mark Twain Biography | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays

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Christened as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835 in the small river town of Florida, Missouri, just 200 miles from ...

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Frederick Douglass (born February 1818, Talbot county, Maryland, U.S.-died February 20, 1895, Washington, D.C.) was an African American abolitionist, orator, newspaper publisher, and author who is famous for his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. He became the first Black U.S. marshal and was the most photographed American man of the 19th century.

Early life and enslavement

Douglass was born enslaved as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on Holme Hill Farm in Talbot county, Maryland. Although the date of his birth was not recorded, Douglass estimated that he had been born in February 1818, and he later celebrated his birthday on February 14. (The best source for the events in Douglass's life is Douglass himself in his oratory and writings, especially his three autobiographies, the details of which have been checked when possible and have largely been confirmed, though his biographers have contributed corrections and clarifications.) Douglass was owned by Capt. Aaron Anthony, who was the clerk and superintendent of overseers for Edward Lloyd V (also known as Colonel Lloyd), a wealthy landowner and slaveholder in eastern Maryland. Like many other enslaved children, Douglass was separated from his mother, Harriet Bailey, when he was very young. He spent his formative years with his maternal grandmother, Betsey Bailey, who had the responsibility of raising young enslaved children.

Harriet Bailey worked as a field hand on a neighbouring plantation and had to walk more than 12 miles (about 19 km) to visit her son, whom she met with only a few times in his life. He described her as "tall and finely proportioned, of dark, glossy complexion, with regular features, and amongst the slaves was remarkably sedate and dignified." She died when he was about seven years old. As an adult, Douglass learned that his mother had been the only Black person in what was then Talbot county who could read, an extraordinarily rare achievement for a field hand.

When Douglass was age five or six, he was taken to live on Colonel Lloyd's home plantation, Wye House. Lloyd's plantation functioned like a small town. Young Douglass found himself among several other enslaved children competing for food and other comforts. In 1826 at approximately age eight, he was sent to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld at Fells Point, Baltimore. Hugh's brother Capt. Thomas Auld was the son-in-law of Douglass's owner, Aaron Anthony. Douglass's responsibility in Baltimore was to care for Hugh and Sophia's young son, Thomas. Sophia began teaching Douglass how to read, along with her son. The lessons ended abruptly, however, when Hugh discovered what had been going on and informed Sophia that literacy would "spoil" a slave. According to Douglass, Hugh stated that if a slave were given an inch, he would "take an ell [a unit of measure equal to about 45 inches]." In Maryland, as in many other slaveholding states, it was forbidden to teach enslaved people how to read and write. Douglass continued his learning in secret, by exchanging bread for lessons from the poor white boys he played with in the neighbourhood and by tracing the letters in Thomas's old schoolbooks.

In March 1832 Douglass was sent from Baltimore to St. Michaels, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. After both Aaron Anthony and his daughter Lucretia died, her husband, Capt. Thomas Auld, became Douglass's owner. Teenage Douglass experienced harsher living conditions with Auld, who was known for his abusive practices.

In January 1833 Douglass was leased to local farmer Edward Covey. Leasing or hiring out enslaved persons was a common revenue-generating practice. Farmers would pay slaveholders a monthly fee for enslaved people and take responsibility for their care, food, and lodging. Covey was known as a "slave breaker," someone who abused slaves physically and psychologically in order to make them more compliant. According to Douglass, Covey's abuse led to a climactic confrontation six months into Douglass's time with the farmer. One day Covey attacked Douglass, and Douglass fought back. The two men engaged in an epic two-hour-long physical struggle. Douglass ultimately won the fight, and Covey never attacked him again. Douglass emerged from the incident determined to protect himself from any physical assault from anyone in the future.

In January 1834 Douglass was sent to William Freeland's farm. Living and working conditions were better under Freeland; however, Douglass still desired his freedom. While living with Freeland, he started a Sabbath school at which he taught area Blacks how to read and write. Along with four other enslaved men, Douglass plotted to escape north by taking a large canoe up the coast of Maryland and to proceed to Pennsylvania, but their plot was discovered. Douglass and the other participants were arrested. Captain Auld then sent Douglass back to Baltimore to live again with Hugh and Sophia Auld and to learn a trade.

Hugh Auld hired out Douglass to local shipyards as a ship caulker. Now working as a skilled tradesman, Douglass was paid by the shipyards for his efforts. He would then submit his earnings to Auld, who gave Douglass a small percentage of the wages. Douglass would eventually hire out his own time, which meant that he paid Auld a set amount every week but was responsible for maintaining his own food and clothing. During this time, Douglass became more involved in Baltimore's Black community, which led him to meet Anna Murray, a freeborn Black woman, whom he would eventually marry.

Escape from slavery, life in New Bedford, and work with the American Anti-Slavery Society

Douglass moved about Baltimore with few restrictions, but that privilege came to an end when he decided to attend a religious meeting outside of Baltimore on a Saturday evening and postpone paying Auld his weekly fee. The following Monday, when Douglass returned, Auld threatened him. After that encounter, Douglass was determined to escape his bondage. He escaped in September 1838 by dressing as a sailor and traveling from Baltimore to Wilmington, Delaware, by train, then on to Philadelphia by steamboat, and from there to New York City by train. Black sailors in the 19th century traveled with documents granting them protection under the American flag. Douglass used such documents to secure his passage north with the help of Anna, who, according to family lore, had sold her feather bed to help finance his passage.

New York City was a dangerous place for enslaved people seeking freedom. Numerous slave catchers traveled to the city to track down those who had escaped. Many locals, Black and white, were willing, for money, to tell the authorities about people trying to escape enslavement. For his own protection, Douglass (still months from assuming that name) changed his name from Frederick Bailey to Frederick Johnson. A chance meeting with Black abolitionist David Ruggles led Douglass to safety. Anna arrived in New York several days later, and the two were married by the Reverend J.W.C. Pennington.

At Ruggles's recommendation, the couple quickly left New York City for New Bedford, Massachusetts. Ruggles had determined that New Bedford's shipping industry would offer Douglass the best chance to find work as a ship caulker. In New Bedford the couple stayed with a local Black married couple, Nathan and Polly Johnson. Because many families in New Bedford had the surname Johnson, Douglass chose to change his name again. Nathan Johnson suggested the name Douglass, which was inspired by the name of an exiled nobleman in Sir Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake. The newly minted Frederick Douglass earned money for the first time as a free man. However, despite Douglass's previous work experience, racial prejudice in New Bedford prevented him from working as a ship caulker (white caulkers refused to work with Black caulkers). Consequently, Douglass spent his first years in Massachusetts working as a common labourer.

Douglass remained an avid reader throughout his adult life. When he escaped to New York, he carried with him a copy of The Columbian Orator. In New Bedford he discovered William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Inspired by it, Douglass attended a Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society convention in Nantucket in the summer of 1841. At the meeting, abolitionist William C. Coffin, having heard Douglass speak in New Bedford, invited him to address the general body. Douglass's extemporaneous speech was lauded by the audience, and he was recruited as an agent for the group.

As an agent of both the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass traveled the country promoting abolition and the organizations' agenda. He and other persons who had escaped conditions of enslavement frequently described their own experiences under those conditions. The American Anti-Slavery Society supported "moral suasion" abolition, the belief that slavery was a moral wrong that should be resisted through nonviolent means. Douglass strongly promoted this philosophy during the early years of his abolitionist career. In his speech at the 1843 National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, New York, Black abolitionist and minister Henry Highland Garnet proposed a resolution that called for enslaved people to rise up against their masters. The controversial resolution ignited a tense debate at the convention, with Douglass rising in firm opposition. His belief in moral suasion would repeatedly place him at odds with other Black abolitionists during this phase of his career. Work as an agent provided Douglass with the means to support his family. He and Anna had five children: Rosetta (born 1839), Lewis (born 1840), Frederick, Jr. (born 1842), Charles (born 1844), and Annie (born 1849).

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, European travel, and The North Star

In 1845 Douglass published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Prior to its publication, audiences at Douglass's lectures had questioned his authenticity as an ex-slave because of his eloquence, refusal to use "plantation speak," and unwillingness to provide details about his origins. The Narrative settled these disputes by naming people and locations in Douglass's life. The book also challenged the conventional employment of ghostwriters for slave narratives by boldly acknowledging that Douglass wrote it himself. Douglass would publish two additional autobiographies: My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). The Narrative quickly became popular, especially in Europe, but the book's success contributed to Hugh Auld's determination to return Douglass to the conditions of enslavement.

The threat of capture, as well as the book's excellent performance in Europe, prompted Douglass to travel abroad from August 1845 to 1847, and he lectured throughout the United Kingdom. His English supporters, led by Ellen and Anna Richardson, purchased Douglass from Hugh Auld, giving him his freedom. In the spring of 1847, Douglass returned to the United States a free man with the funding to start his own newspaper.

Douglass moved to Rochester, New York, to publish his newspaper, The North Star, despite objections from Garrison and others. Basing the newspaper in Rochester ensured that The North Star did not compete with the distribution of The Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New England. The North Star's first issue appeared on December 3, 1847. In 1851 the paper merged with the Liberty Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass' Paper, which ran until 1860. Douglass would publish two additional newspapers during his life, Douglass' Monthly (1859-63) and New National Era (1870-74).

The move to Rochester surrounded Douglass with political abolitionists such as Gerrit Smith. During his first few years in Rochester, Douglass remained loyal to Garrison's philosophy, which promoted moral suasion, stated that the U.S. Constitution was an invalid document, and discouraged participation in American politics because it was a system corrupted by slavery. In 1851, however, Douglass announced his split from Garrison when he declared that the Constitution was a valid legal document that could be used on behalf of emancipation. Consequently, Douglass became more engaged in American politics and constitutional interpretation.

Involvement with John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony

The country's tension around slavery rapidly increased in the 1850s. Douglass's Rochester home was part of the Underground Railroad and hosted numerous fellow abolitionists. In 1859 Douglass met with abolitionist John Brown in a quarry in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Brown invited Douglass to participate in the planned raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), which Brown hoped would inspire a massive uprising by enslaved people. Douglass declined the invitation. Shortly after the raid (October 16-19), Douglass received word that the authorities were looking to arrest him as an accomplice. He quickly fled to Canada before heading to Europe for a scheduled lecture tour. Douglass returned home in April 1860 after learning that his youngest daughter, Annie, had died.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Douglass strongly advocated for inclusion of Black soldiers in the Union army. He became a recruiter for the Massachusetts 54th, an all-Black infantry regiment in which his sons Lewis and Charles served. In 1863 Douglass visited the White House to meet with Pres. Abraham Lincoln to advocate for better pay and conditions for the soldiers. Lincoln then invited Douglass to the White House in 1864 to discuss what could be done for Blacks in the case of a Union loss. Douglass would meet with Lincoln a third time, after the president's second inauguration and about a month before his assassination.

The Emancipation Proclamation and the Union's victory presented a new reality: millions of Black people were free. Douglass dedicated himself to securing the community's rights to this new freedom. He strongly supported the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted Blacks citizenship, but he realized that this new citizenship status needed to be protected by suffrage. Initially Douglass supported a constitutional amendment supporting suffrage for all men and women. Having attended the 1848 women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, he was a longtime supporter of women's rights, joining Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in this stance. Reconstruction politics, however, indicated that a universal suffrage amendment would fail. Douglass then supported Black male suffrage with the idea that Black men could help women secure the right to vote later. This placed him at odds with Stanton and Anthony. Douglass hoped that the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment would encourage African Americans to stay in the South to consolidate their power as a voting bloc, but the region's high levels of violence against African Americans led him to support Black migration to safer areas of the country.

Move to Washington, D.C., the Freedman's Bank, government office-holding, and later years

After a fire destroyed his Rochester home, Douglass moved in 1872 to Washington, D.C., where he published his latest newspaper venture, New National Era. The newspaper folded in 1874 because of its poor fiscal health. That same year Douglass was appointed president of the Freedman's Savings & Trust, also known as the Freedman's Bank. The bank failed four months after he became president because of the years of corruption that predated his association with the bank. The bank's failure harmed his reputation, but Douglass worked with the U.S. Congress to remedy the damage caused by the bank.

After the Freedman's Bank debacle, Douglass held numerous government appointments. He became the first Black U.S. marshal in 1877 when he was appointed to that post for the District of Columbia by Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes. He served in that capacity until 1881, when Pres. James A. Garfield appointed him to the high-paying position of recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. In 1889 Pres. Benjamin Harrison selected Douglass as the U.S. minister resident and consul general to the Republic of Haiti. The major controversy during Douglass's tenure was the quest by the United States to acquire the port town of Môle Saint-Nicolas as a refueling station for the U.S. Navy. Douglass disagreed with the Harrison administration's approach, preferring to promote the autonomy of the Haitian government. He resigned the position in 1891 and returned to his home in Washington, D.C.

Douglass spent the last 17 years of his life at Cedar Hill, his home in the Anacostia neighbourhood of Washington, D.C., to which he had moved in 1878. On August 4, 1882, Anna Murray Douglass died in the home after suffering a stroke. In 1884 Douglass married Helen Pitts, his white secretary, who was about 20 years younger than her husband. The marriage was controversial for its time, and it resulted in Douglass's temporary estrangement from some friends and family.

During the latter years of his life, Douglass remained committed to social justice and the African American community. His prominence and work resulted in his being the most photographed American man in the 19th century. His distinguished photographs were deliberate contradictions to the visual stereotypes of African Americans at the time, which often exaggerated their facial features, skin colour, and physical bodies and demeaned their intelligence. He served on Howard University's board of trustees from 1871 to 1895. Douglass cultivated relationships with younger activists, most notably Ida B. Wells, who featured his letter to her in her book Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. He also contributed to her pamphlet protesting the exclusion of exhibits dedicated to African American culture from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.

Douglass died in his Cedar Hill home on February 20, 1895. After his death, Helen Pitts Douglass established the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association to preserve his legacy. She bequeathed the home and its belongings to the organization in her will. Cedar Hill became part of the National Park system in 1962, and it was designated the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in 1988. The U.S. Library of Congress digitized its holdings of Douglass's papers, which include letters, speeches, and personal documents.

At the end of his life, Douglass, an American icon who fought for social justice and equity, became known as the "Lion of Anacostia." Through his writings, speeches, and photographs, he boldly challenged the racial stereotypes of African Americans. Douglass's contributions to the Black American community and American history were recognized in the early 20th century during Negro History Week, the predecessor of Black History Month, which many communities anchored to the day on which his birthday was celebrated, February 14. Today Douglass is renowned not just for his rise from slavery to the highest levels of American society but also for his dedication to challenging the country to recognize the rights of all people and be consistent with its ideals.

Noelle Trent

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Frederick Douglass | Biography, Accomplishments, & Facts

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Frederick Douglass, African American abolitionist, orator, newspaper publisher, and author who is famous for his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. He became the first Black U.S. marshal and was the most photographed American man of the 19th century.

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On this day, Upton Sinclair, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and reformer, is born in Baltimore, Maryland.

Sinclair came from a once well-to-do Southern family that had suffered reverses. When he was 10, the family moved to New York. Starting at age 15, he earned money writing dime novels, which paid his way through New York's City College and Columbia University.

Sinclair, who married in 1900, also earned money writing journalistic pieces. An assignment on meat-packing plants led to his bestselling novel The Jungle, in which an idealistic immigrant goes to work in the Chicago stockyards. Unable to find a publisher for his book, he ultimately published it himself. The novel's gritty portrayal of labor abuses and unsanitary conditions led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

The book became a bestseller. Sinclair used the proceeds to fund a socialist utopia called Helicone Home Colony in Englewood, New York. However, the cooperative-living building burned down after a year, and Sinclair gave up the project. He wrote several more well-known novels, though none were as successful as his first. The Metropolis (1908) examined high society in New York, Oil! (1927) looked at the Teapot Dome scandal, and Boston (1928) dealt with the controversial Sacco and Vanzetti trial.

Sinclair moved to Pasadena in 1915. He fought for leftist reforms in the 1930s and 1940s. Meanwhile, he wrote a series of 11 novels looking at contemporary history. His hero, Larry Budd, travels the world and meets such figures as Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler. In 1942, his book Dragon's Teeth, portraying Germany's descent into Nazism in the 1930s, won the Pulitzer Prize. The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair came out in 1962, and the author died six years later in Bound Brook, New Jersey.

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Upton Sinclair is born - Sep 20, 1878 - HISTORY.com

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On this day, Upton Sinclair, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and reformer, is born in Baltimore, Maryland. Sinclair came from a once well-to-do Southern family that had suffered reverses. When he was 10, the family moved to New York. Starting at age 15, he earned money writing dime novels, which paid his way through New York's City College and Columbia University.

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The term "Lost Generation" refers to the generation of people who reached adulthood during or immediately following World War I. In using the term "lost," psychologists were referring to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" feelings that haunted many survivors of what had been one of the most horrific wars in modern history.

In a deeper sense, the lost generation was "lost" because it found the conservative moral and social values of their parents to be irrelevant in a post-war world. In the United States, President Warren G. Harding's "back to normalcy" policy calling for a return to the way of life before World War I, left the members of the lost generation feeling spiritually alienated from facing what they believed would be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren lives.

Key Takeaways: The Lost Generation

Having witnessed what they considered pointless death on such a massive scale during the war, many members of the generation rejected more traditional ideas of proper behavior, morality, and gender roles. They were considered to be "lost" due to their tendency to act aimlessly, even recklessly, often focusing on the hedonistic accumulation of personal wealth.

In literature, the term also refers to a group of well-known American authors and poets including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot, whose works often detailed the internal struggles of the "Lost Generation."

The term is believed to have come from an actual verbal exchange witnessed by novelist Gertrude Stein during which a French garage owner derisively told his young employee, "You are all a lost generation." Stein repeated the phrase to her colleague and pupil Ernest Hemingway, who popularized the term when he used it as an epigraph to his classic 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.

In an interview for The Hemingway Project, Kirk Curnutt, author of several books about the Lost Generation writers suggested that they were expressing mythologized versions of their own lives.

Said Curnutt:

"They were convinced they were the products of a generational breach, and they wanted to capture the experience of newness in the world around them. As such, they tended to write about alienation, unstable mores like drinking, divorce, sex, and different varieties of unconventional self-identities like gender-bending."

Decadent Excesses

Throughout their novels The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby, Hemingway and Fitzgerald feature the decedent, self-indulgent lifestyles of their Lost Generation characters. In both The Great Gatsby and Tales of the Jazz Age Fitzgerald depicts an endless stream of lavish parties hosted by the main characters.

With their values so completely destroyed by the war, the expatriate American circles of friends in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast live shallow, hedonistic lifestyles, aimlessly roaming the world while drinking and partying.

Fallacy of Great American Dream

Members of the Lost Generation viewed the idea of the "American Dream" as a grand deception. This becomes a prominent theme in The Great Gatsby as the story's narrator Nick Carraway comes to realize that Gatsby's vast fortune had been paid for with great misery.

To Fitzgerald, the traditional vision of the American Dream-that hard work led to success-had become corrupted. To the Lost Generation, "living the dream" was no longer about simply building a self-sufficient life, but about getting stunningly rich by any means necessary.

The term "American Dream" refers to the belief that everyone has the right and freedom to seek prosperity and happiness, regardless of where or into what social class they were born. A key element of the American dream is the assumption that through hard work, perseverance, and risk-taking, anyone can rise "from rags to riches," to attain their own version of success in becoming financially prosperous and socially upwardly mobile.

The American Dream is rooted in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that "all men are created equal" with the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

American freelance writer and historian James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase "American Dream" in his 1931 book Epic of America:

"But there has been also the American dream; that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

Since the 1920s, the American Dream has been questioned and often criticized by researchers and social scientists as being a misplaced belief that contradicts reality in the modern United States.

Gender-Bending and Impotence

Many young men eagerly entered World War I still believing combat to be more of a chivalrous, even glamorous pastime than an inhumane struggle for survival.

However, the reality they experienced-the brutal slaughter of more than 18 million people, including 6 million civilians-shattered their traditional images of masculinity and their perceptions around differing roles of men and women in society.

Left impotent by his war wounds, Jake, the narrator and central character in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, describes how his sexually aggressive and promiscuous female lover Brett acts as the man, trying to be "one of the boys" in an effort to control the lives of her sexual partners.

In T.S. Eliot's ironically titled poem " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Prufrock laments how his embarrassment from feelings of emasculation has left him sexually frustrated and unable to declare his love for the poem's unnamed female recipients, referred to as "they."

(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!')
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-
(They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!')

In the first chapter of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Gatsby's trophy girlfriend Daisy delivers a telling vision of her newborn daughter's future.

"I hope she'll be a fool-that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

In a theme that still resonates in today's feminist movement, Daisy's words express Fitzgerald's opinion of his generation as spawning a society that largely devalued intelligence in women.

While the older generation valued women who were docile and subservient, the Lost Generation held mindless pleasure-seeking as the key to a woman's "success."

While she seemed to bemoan her generation's view of gender roles, Daisy conformed to them, acting as a "fun girl" to avoid the tensions of her true love for the ruthless Gatsby.

Belief in an Impossible Future

Unable or unwilling to come to grips with the horrors of warfare, many of the Lost Generation created impossibly unrealistic hopes for the future.

This is expressed best in the final lines of The Great Gatsby in which narrator Nick exposed Gatsby's idealized vision of Daisy that had always prevented him from seeing her as she really was.

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The "green light" in the passage is Fitzgerald's metaphor for the perfect futures we continue to believe in even while watching it get ever farther away from us.

In other words, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Lost Generation continued to believe that "one fine day," our dreams will come true.

A New Lost Generation?

By their very nature, all wars create "lost" survivors.

While returning combat veterans have traditionally died of suicide and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at much higher rates than the general population, returning veterans of the Gulf War and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are at an even higher risk. According to a 2016 report from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, an average of 20 of these veterans a day die from suicide.

Could these "modern" wars be creating a modern "Lost Generation?" With mental wounds often more serious and far more difficult to treat than physical trauma, many combat veterans struggle to reintegrate into civilian society. A report from the RAND Corporation estimates that some 20% of returning veterans either have or will develop PTSD.

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The term "Lost Generation" refers to the generation of people who reached adulthood during or immediately following World War I. In using the term "lost," psychologists were referring to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" feelings that haunted many survivors of what had been one of the most horrific wars in modern history.

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Quick Facts
"This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other 364.""Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.""New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.""The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.""I'd rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I've got so much more of it.""Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.""Do not put off 'til tomorrow what can be put off 'til day-after-tomorrow just as well.""In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.""'Classic'-a book which people praise and don't read.""When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.""Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.""We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life, but would assassinate you.""Be good and you will be lonesome."

Name

Mark Twain

Birth Date

November 30, 1835

Death Date

April 21, 1910

Place of Birth

Florida, Missouri

Place of Death

Redding, Connecticut

Who Was Mark Twain?

Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, was the celebrated author of several novels, including two major classics of American literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and inventor.

Early Life

Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to nearby Hannibal, a bustling river town of 1,000 people.

John Clemens worked as a storekeeper, lawyer, judge and land speculator, dreaming of wealth but never achieving it, sometimes finding it hard to feed his family. He was an unsmiling fellow; according to one legend, young Sam never saw his father laugh.

His mother, by contrast, was a fun-loving, tenderhearted homemaker who whiled away many a winter's night for her family by telling stories. She became head of the household in 1847 when John died unexpectedly.

The Clemens family "now became almost destitute," wrote biographer Everett Emerson, and was forced into years of economic struggle - a fact that would shape the career of Twain.

Twain in Hannibal

Twain stayed in Hannibal until age 17. The town, situated on the Mississippi River, was in many ways a splendid place to grow up.

Steamboats arrived there three times a day, tooting their whistles; circuses, minstrel shows and revivalists paid visits; a decent library was available; and tradesmen such as blacksmiths and tanners practiced their entertaining crafts for all to see.

However, violence was commonplace, and young Twain witnessed much death: When he was nine years old, he saw a local man murder a cattle rancher, and at 10 he watched a slave die after a white overseer struck him with a piece of iron.

Hannibal inspired several of Twain's fictional locales, including "St. Petersburg" in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. These imaginary river towns are complex places: sunlit and exuberant on the one hand, but also vipers' nests of cruelty, poverty, drunkenness, loneliness and soul-crushing boredom - all parts of Twain's boyhood experience.

Sam kept up his schooling until he was about 12 years old, when - with his father dead and the family needing a source of income - he found employment as an apprentice printer at the Hannibal Courier, which paid him with a meager ration of food. In 1851, at 15, he got a job as a printer and occasional writer and editor at the Hannibal Western Union, a little newspaper owned by his brother, Orion.

Steamboat Pilot

Then, in 1857, 21-year-old Twain fulfilled a dream: He began learning the art of piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi. A licensed steamboat pilot by 1859, he soon found regular employment plying the shoals and channels of the great river.

Twain loved his career - it was exciting, well-paying and high-status, roughly akin to flying a jetliner today. However, his service was cut short in 1861 by the outbreak of the Civil War, which halted most civilian traffic on the river.

As the Civil War began, the people of Missouri angrily split between support for the Union and the Confederate States. Twain opted for the latter, joining the Confederate Army in June 1861 but serving for only a couple of weeks until his volunteer unit disbanded.

Where, he wondered then, would he find his future? What venue would bring him both excitement and cash? His answer: the great American West.

Heading Out West

In July 1861, Twain climbed on board a stagecoach and headed for Nevada and California, where he would live for the next five years.

At first, he prospected for silver and gold, convinced that he would become the savior of his struggling family and the sharpest-dressed man in Virginia City and San Francisco. But nothing panned out, and by the middle of 1862, he was flat broke and in need of a regular job.

Twain knew his way around a newspaper office, so that September, he went to work as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He churned out news stories, editorials and sketches, and along the way adopted the pen name Mark Twain - steamboat slang for 12 feet of water.

Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in the West. He honed a distinctive narrative style - friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious.

He got a big break in 1865, when one of his tales about life in a mining camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country (the story later appeared under various titles).

'Innocents Abroad'

His next step up the ladder of success came in 1867, when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of the trip.

In 1869, The Innocents Abroad was published, and it became a nationwide bestseller.

At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America.

Marriage to Olivia Langdon

However, Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those years, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern establishment centered in New York City and Boston - a straight-laced, Victorian, moneyed group that cowed Twain.

"An indisputable and almost overwhelming sense of inferiority bounced around his psyche," wrote scholar Hamlin Hill, noting that these feelings were competing with his aggressiveness and vanity. Twain's fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization."

In February 1870, he improved his social status by marrying 24-year-old Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have ... the only sweetheart I have ever loved ... she is the best girl, and the sweetest, and gentlest, and the daintiest, and she is the most perfect gem of womankind."

Livy, like many people during that time, took pride in her pious, high-minded, genteel approach to life. Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S MARK TWAIN FACT CARD

Mark Twain's Books

Thankfully, Twain's glorious "low-minded" Western voice broke through on occasion.

'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, and soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of the culture he had chosen to embrace."

'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Twain called Huckleberry Finn," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935, giving short shrift to Herman Melville and others but making an interesting point.

Hemingway's comment refers specifically to the colloquial language of Twain's masterpiece, as for perhaps the first time in America, the vivid, raw, not-so-respectable voice of the common folk was used to create great literature.

Huck Finn required years to conceptualize and write, and Twain often put it aside. In the meantime, he pursued respectability with the 1881 publication of The Prince and the Pauper, a charming novel endorsed with enthusiasm by his genteel family and friends.

'Life on the Mississippi'

In 1883 he put out Life on the Mississippi, an interesting but safe travel book. When Huck Finn finally was published in 1884, Livy gave it a chilly reception.

After that, business and writing were of equal value to Twain as he set about his cardinal task of earning a lot of money. In 1885, he triumphed as a book publisher by issuing the bestselling memoirs of former President Ulysses S. Grant, who had just died.

He lavished many hours on this and other business ventures, and was certain that his efforts would be rewarded with enormous wealth, but he never achieved the success he expected. His publishing house eventually went bankrupt.

'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'

Twain's financial failings, reminiscent in some ways of his father's, had serious consequences for his state of mind. They contributed powerfully to a growing pessimism in him, a deep-down feeling that human existence is a cosmic joke perpetrated by a chuckling God.

Another cause of his angst, perhaps, was his unconscious anger at himself for not giving undivided attention to his deepest creative instincts, which centered on his Missouri boyhood.

In 1889, Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a science-fiction/historical novel about ancient England. His next major work, in 1894, was The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, a somber novel that some observers described as "bitter."

He also wrote short stories, essays and several other books, including a study of Joan of Arc. Some of these later works have enduring merit, and his unfinished work The Chronicle of Young Satan has fervent admirers today.

Twain's last 15 years were filled with public honors, including degrees from Oxford and Yale. Probably the most famous American of the late 19th century, he was much photographed and applauded wherever he went.

Indeed, he was one of the most prominent celebrities in the world, traveling widely overseas, including a successful 'round-the-world lecture tour in 1895-96, undertaken to pay off his debts.

Family Struggles

But while those years were gilded with awards, they also brought him much anguish. Early in their marriage, he and Livy had lost their toddler son, Langdon, to diphtheria; in 1896, his favorite daughter, Susy, died at the age of 24 of spinal meningitis. The loss broke his heart, and adding to his grief, he was out of the country when it happened.

His youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with severe epilepsy. In 1909, when she was 29 years old, Jean died of a heart attack. For many years, Twain's relationship with middle daughter Clara was distant and full of quarrels.

In June 1904, while Twain traveled, Livy died after a long illness. "The full nature of his feelings toward her is puzzling," wrote scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. "If he treasured Livy's comradeship as much as he often said, why did he spend so much time away from her?"

But absent or not, throughout 34 years of marriage, Twain had indeed loved his wife. "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden," he wrote in tribute to her.

Twain became somewhat bitter in his later years, even while projecting an amiable persona to his public. In private he demonstrated a stunning insensitivity to friends and loved ones.

"Much of the last decade of his life, he lived in hell," wrote Hamlin Hill. He wrote a fair amount but was unable to finish most of his projects. His memory faltered.

Twain suffered volcanic rages and nasty bouts of paranoia, and he experienced many periods of depressed indolence, which he tried to assuage by smoking cigars, reading in bed and playing endless hours of billiards and cards.

Death

Twain died on April 21, 1910, at the age of 74. He was buried in Elmira, New York.

The Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, is now a popular attraction and is designated a National Historic Landmark.

Twain is remembered as a great chronicler of American life in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Writing grand tales about Sawyer, Finn and the mighty Mississippi River, Twain explored the American soul with wit, buoyancy and a sharp eye for truth.

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"This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other 364." "Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries." "New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions."

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A hundred years ago, in the summer of 1906, the American author Upton Sinclair completed a novel called The Jungle. The work, a 'muckraking' account of labour and unsanitary conditions in the Chicago stockyards, quickly established itself as a classic denunciation of industrial capitalism and one of the most revolutionary novels of the age.

Originally commissioned for serialisation by the radical American journal Appeal to Reason, The Jungle catapulted Sinclair to international prominence and placed him at centre of a radical social movement that sought to resist the acceleration of monopoly capitalism during the 'Progressive Era' in early twentieth century America. The dominant theme of this movement was the attempt, through works of literature, to arouse resistance to the escalating dominance of a political and economic elite whose control over the media stifled public awareness, debate, and activism.

The Jungle was written in a turbulent age. When Theodore Roosevelt became President in 1901, America was a country deeply divided by the extremes of wealth and poverty. The period since the Civil War had been overshadowed by the rapid development of capitalism and an ebb and flow in the workers' bitter struggle to organise the defence of working conditions against the onslaught of capital. After the mass strike of 1877, employers' repression of labour was aided by the courts and the enactment of anti-union conspiracy laws as well as the revival of state militias (later to be renamed the National Guard) as the instrument to break strikes.

Open class warfare intensified after the 1886 Haymarket incident, when police attacked a Chicago demonstration demanding the 8-hour working day. In the resulting chaos a bomb was thrown, police and protesters were killed, and the leaders of the radical groups involved arrested, charged and seven of their number subsequently executed for murder. The newspapers whipped up public hysteria against the labour movement and the violent suppression of strikes by armed troops and private armies became widespread across America. Blacklisting, strike-breaking, the murder of trade unionists and police harassment were orchestrated by the business and political elite to prevent the formation of a mass working class organisation. The offices of trade unions and radical groups were often raided and ransacked, leaders arrested, printing presses destroyed and armed vigilante groups were organised by business to break-up meetings.

The Jungle captured the brutality of the era and not unexpectedly Sinclair had difficulty finding a publisher for his devastating novel. An employee at the publishers Macmillan wrote, "I advise without hesitation and unreservedly against the publication of this book which is gloom and horror unrelieved. One feels that what is at the bottom of his fierceness is not nearly so much desire to help the poor as hatred of the rich." Undaunted, Sinclair self-published and the novel immediately caused uproar, but not in the way he had hoped.

Sinclair's intention in writing the novel had been to draw attention to the appalling conditions and squalor of wage-labourers under capitalism by unfolding the tragedy of his central character, Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant working in the meat packing houses of Packingtown, a suburb of Chicago. But his objective was lost on the public, overshadowed by his descriptions of the unsanitary conditions and inadequate regulation in the meat processing plants. Creating a fear that public indignation would lead to a collapse in confidence and hence inthe profits of the Beef Trusts, the nauseating detail exposed in The Jungle prompted instead the intervention of President Roosevelt and the subsequent passage of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Sinclair would later lament, " I aimed for their hearts, and hit their stomachs."
Widely read
Although failing to accomplish his immediate goal, Sinclair remained a highly acclaimed and widely read author, whose other works included King Coal (1917) and The Profits of Religion (1918). But in 1919 he completed The Brass Check, which heconsidered "the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written"(8th edition 1920, p. 429.). The work was a devastating critique of the contradiction of capitalist newspaper production for profit and a so-called "free press." It accused American journalism of being a class institution serving the rich in which "Politics, Journalism, and Big Business work hand in hand for the hoodwinking of the public and the plundering of labour." ( The Brass Check, p.153). In 1942 he wrote Dragon's Teeth, a novel on the rise of Nazism that won him the 1945 Pulitzer Prize. A prodigious writer, he completed, ninety-two books and twenty-nine pamphlets attacking all aspects of social injustice until his death in 1968 at the age of 90.

But for all Sinclair's criticism of the capitalist economic system, he naively clung to the belief that capitalism could be reformed and made to organise in the interests of the working class. He held a deep 'moralistic' view that capitalism could be 'tamed' by 'social justice' and was strongly influenced by the 'reformism' propagated by the Socialist Party of America (established in 1901) which he had joined in 1902. The Socialist Party of America regarded its immediate task as building a mass party to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism and consequently attracted members with a wide variety of reformist opinions.

Like all parties of capitalism that have revolutionary pretensions, the Socialist Party of America was never able to offer a unified response to a number of important questions and in the course of the next 40 years would be torn apart. In the early years the membership held conflicting views on trade unionism, (in particular its relationship with the American Federation of Labour and the IWW) entry into the War, the social reforms of the 'Progressive Era' under Woodrow Wilson's administration and the 1917 Russian Revolution.

In the 1930s the Party would split over its response to Stalinism and the rise of Fascism in Europe. But it was the government's legislation to shore up American capitalism under Roosevelt's New Deal, that finally sapped the Party's remaining support and by 1937 the Socialist Party of America was a spent force. The confusion sown by Party propaganda caused many workers to regard the legislation of the New Deal as the embodiment of the "socialistic" principles that seemed to overlap with the Party's own "immediate demands" for social reform.

Sinclair too must take a share of the responsibility for misguiding the American working class. When America entered the First World War he wrote an article in the radical journal The Masses, that argued that America should enter the war to defeat anti-democratic German militarism and, together with others including Charles Edward Russell and A. M. Simons, resigned his Party membership in protest against the Party's anti-war position. He wrote, "If Germany be allowed to win this war - then we in America shall have to drop every other activity and devote the next twenty or thirty years to preparing for a last-ditch defence of the democratic principle."

Woodrow's Wilson's decision to enter the war and its aftermath effectively crushed the American radical labour movement. The Espionage Act of 1917 legitimised government repression by banning radical journals, imposing crippling fines and exposing labour leaders to beatings and arrests. Eugene Debs, once leader of the Socialist Party of America, was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment after making his famous anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio in 1918. In 1927 Sinclair wrote an article for The Nation in which he recanted his view and conceded that his earlier stance on the First World War had been incorrect.
Ran for Governor
In the 1920s Sinclair, a firm supporter of Prohibition, helped to establish the Californian chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and after rejoining the Socialist Party of America he became their unsuccessful candidate for governor of California in 1926. In 1934 he again stood for governor but this time he abandoned his own party and entered the Democratic Party Primary, winning on a platform known as EPIC (End Poverty in California). In his election proclamation Sinclair maintained that capitalism had gone into permanent crisis and proposed the utopian establishment of a co-operative system for America's ten million unemployed, "producing everything which they themselves consume and exchanging those goods among themselves by a method of barter, using warehouse receipts or labour certificates." ( The Literary Digest, October 13, 1934).

Although he lost the election, Sinclair received considerable support, polling over 879,000 votes (37 percent) but his candidature split both the Democratic Party and the Socialist Party of America. Many of his colleagues were appalled by his action, and Sinclair's son David accused him of "insane opportunism," to which Sinclair mildly replied that he was just trying to "educate" the public. After his defeat Sinclair largely abandoned EPIC and returned to his writing.

Sinclair, like the political party he supported, was riddled with contradictions. A scathing critic of capitalism he never once demanded its abolition, preferring instead to compromise with capitalism and pursue abstract notions of 'social justice'. He claimed to be a socialist and yet for much of his life was a member of a political party that would only have administered the capitalist system. He supported America's entry into the war - and the murder of American workers - while acknowledging that the war had nothing to do with the American working class. He was prepared to make alliances with the capitalist organisations including the Democratic Party despite believing that, in the American two party system, elections were when people "go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the candidates of their exploiters." ( The Brass Check, p.222.) He claimed to be a friend of the working class but would occasionally display racist and nationalistic tendencies in his works.

Sinclair displayed immense talent when he wrote The Jungle. The novel brought him fame and position of influence but his naivety and muddled thinking in the political sphere did little to advance the cause of workers in America.

STEVE TROTT

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A hundred years ago, in the summer of 1906, the American author Upton Sinclair completed a novel called The Jungle. The work, a 'muckraking' account of labour and unsanitary conditions in the Chicago stockyards, quickly established itself as a classic denunciation of industrial capitalism and one of the most revolutionary novels of the age.

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Upton Sinclair facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Upton Sinclair

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Get information, facts, and pictures about Upton Sinclair at Encyclopedia.com. Make research projects and school reports about Upton Sinclair easy with credible articles from our FREE, online encyclopedia and dictionary.

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SparkNotes: A Farewell to Arms: Plot Overview

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A short summary of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of A Farewell to Arms.

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Janet Cooke

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After reading "Jimmy's World," the handout, please print out the following two articles. Please be prepared to discuss them in class on Thursday. The first of the two articles was printed a few days after Cooke was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, journalism's highest award. The second article was written by Bill Green, the Washington Post's ombudsman. An ombudsman is a person who is paid by the newspaper to assess that paper's coverage, often critically. Please note that the below articles are transcriptions from Lexis-Nexis and contain typos.

TITLE: Post Reporter's Pulitzer Prize Is Withdrawn;
Pulitzer Board Withdraws Post Reporter's Prize [excerpts]

April 16, 1981, Thursday, Final Edition

BYLINE: By David A. Maraniss, Washington Post Staff Writer

BODY:
The Pulitzer Prize Committee withdrew its feature-writing prize from Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke yesterday after she admitted that her award-winning story was a fabrication.

Cooke's story, "Jimmy's World," was about an alleged 8-year-old heroin addict in the District of Columbia. It was said to be based on interviews with the boy, his mother and his mother's boyfriend. Cooke now acknowledges that she never met or interviewed any of those people and that she made up the story of Jimmy based on a composite of information about heroin addiction in Washington gleaned from various social workers and other sources.

Her admission followed revelations that certain statements she had made in an autobiographical report to the Pulitzer authorities also were false. Cooke had said that she was a magna cum laude graduate of Vassar College and held a master's degree from the University of Toledo. In fact, she attended Vassar for her freshman year and received a bachelor of arts from the University of Toledo.

Cooke resigned from The Washington Post yesterday.

"It is tragedy that someone as talented and promising as Janet Cooke, with everything going for her, felt that she had to falsify the facts," said Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post. "The credibility of a newspaper is its most precious asset, and it depends almost entirely on the integrity of its reporters. When that integrity is questioned and found wanting, the wounds are grievous, and there is nothing to do but come clean with our readers, apologize to the Advisory Board of the Pulitzer Prizes, and begin immediately on the uphill task of regaining our credibility. This we are doing."....

In a statement yesterday, Cooke, 26, said: "The [article] was a serious misrepresentation which I deeply regret. I apologize to my newspaper, my profession, the Pulitzer board and all seekers of the truth."....

Upon publication, the Jimmy article prompted a strong and immediate response in the city. Mayor Marion Barry and Chief of Police Burtell Jefferson assigned a task force of police and social workers to locate the 8-year-old cited in the city and to obtain medical treatment for him. When the child could not be located, Barry and Jefferson voiced deep skepticism about the validity of the story. Barry said he believed "Jimmy" did not exist, or was a composite of several different youngsters.

Barry and Jefferson were informed of the true circumstances of the story early yesterday afternoon by Bradlee, who apologized to both men....

The Post learned that irregularities might exist in Cooke's autobiographical submission to the Pulitzer board early Tuesday afternoon, when officials at Vassar College called Bradlee and told him that Cooke had not graduated magna cum laude, but in fact had only attended the school for her freshman year. At the same time, the Associated Press called Post Managing Editor Howard Simons to report the AP staffers in Ohio were being told that Cooke had not received a master's degree from the University of Toledo....

William Green, The Post's ombudsman, who handles readers' complaints as well as internal problems, has undertaken an investigation of the entire incident. Bradlee has directed that all Post staff members disclose all information relevant to the incident to Green, and Bradlee said Green's findings will be published when they are completed.

SECTION: First Section; A12
April 19, 1981, Sunday, Final Edition

LENGTH: 13967 words

HEADLINE: THE PLAYERS: It Wasn't a Game;
THE REPORTER: When She Smiled, She Dazzled; When She Crashed . . . ;
The Story: First the Idea, and Finally the Presses Rolled;
THE PUBLICATION: 'Jimmy' Hit Washington Like a Grenade, and Bounced;
THE DOUBTS: From the Very First Moment, Some Suspected the Worst;
THE OMBUDSMAN: After the Agony, the Reappraisal;
The Prize: Of Fiefdoms and Their Knights and Ladies of Adventure;
THE CONFESSION: At the End, There Were the Questions, Then the Tears;
THE PRESSURES: Heat and the Achievers Both Have a Tendancy to Rise;
THE CONCLUSIONS: Once Again, a Fail-Safe System Proves the Exception

BYLINE: Bill Green, Washington Post Ombudsman

BODY:
In alphabetical order, here are the editors and reporters referred to or quoted in these reports:

Vivian Aplin-Brownlee, 34, editor of the District Weekly.

Karlyn Barker, 34, metropolitan staff reporter.

Benjamin C. Bradlee, 59, executive editor.

Milton Coleman, 34, city editor.

Janet Cooke, 26, metropolitan staff reporter assigned first to the District Weekly and then to the city staff.

Herb Denton, 37, former city editor, now national staff reporter.

Donald Graham, 37, publisher of The Washington Post.

Blaine Harden, 29, former metropolitan staff reporter, now assigned to the national staff and The Washington Post Magazine.

Neil Henry, 26, metropolitan staff reporter assigned to the Maryland staff.

Stan Hinden, 54, Weekly editor, in charge of the District, Maryland and Virginia Weeklies that appear in the Thursday Post.

Bo Jones, 34, lawyer for The Washington Post.

David Maraniss, 31, deputy metropolitan editor and Maryland editor.

Courtland Milloy, 29, city staff reporter.

Jonathan Neumann, 30, metropolitan staff reporter.

Joanne Omang, 38, national staff reporter.

Donnie Radcliffe, 51, reporter for the Style section.

Sandy Rovner, 52, reporter for the Style section.

Howard Simons, 51, managing editor.

Lewis Simons, 42, metropolitan staff reporter assigned to the regional desk.

Elsa Walsh, 23, reporter for the Virginia Weekly.

Tom Wilkinson, 44, assistant managing editor for personnel.

Robert U. (Bob) Woodward, 38, assistant managing editor-Metro.
THE REPORTER: When She Smiled, She Dazzled; When She Crashed . . .

On July 12, 1979, 11 days before her 25th birthday, Janet Cooke, a reporter on the Toledo Blade, wrote a letter to Ben Bradlee.It was the kind of letter Bradlee receives daily.

"Dear Mr. Bradlee:

"I have been a full time reporter for The Blade for slightly more than two years, and I believe I am now ready to tackle the challenge of working for a larger newspaper in a major city. . . ."

Attached to the letter was a resume and copies of six stories Cooke had written for The Toledo Blade. One thing caught Bradlee's eye: the resume said Cooke was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vassar in 1976. Bradlee underlined those statements and sent the clippings and resume to Bob Woodward. On the letter, he scrawled to his secretary that he would see Cooke.

When Cooke visited The Post two weeks later, every interviewer was impressed. She was a striking, smartly dressed, articulate black woman, precisely the kind of applicant editors welcome, given the pressures to hire minorities and women.

And she could write.

As is the usual practice, she was interviewed around the newsroom, the city editor, the Style editor, the Metro editor.

The written summary of impressions, compiled by Tom Wilkinson, assistant managing editor for personnel, states:

"Janet Cooke came in and saw everyone and was pretty high on everyone's list. What impressed me is that she had pretty well created her own beat. She seems to be a pretty good self-starter. I found her to be very smart." So did others. Only city editor Herb Denton questioned whether she was tough enough. "There's a lot of Vassar still in her," Denton said.

Hiring is a group decision at The Post -- the editors call it collegial -- and it takes time. Sometime in the next couple of months, nobody remembers the exact date, a memo went to Wilkinson from Woodward. It said, "We're ready to offer her a job on the Weekly. Can we go ahead?"

They could, and Janet was employed as a reporter by The Post on Jan. 3, 1980. So impressed had the staff been with her and her writing that the usual check of references was done in a cursory manner. Wilkinson vaguely remembers talking with someone at The Blade. Others can't remember any checks.

She was assigned to the District Weekly, where a staff prepares one of the three local sections for zoned distribution every Thursday in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

The editor, Stan Hinden, a veteran of 30 years in journalism, remembers: "Janet was much like many reporters we get from smaller papers. That is, she wrote and reported reasonably well. We tend to be detail-conscious, and she needed to know how to get more detail, but she was good and smart and better than most."

Cooke worked directly under Vivian Aplin-Brownlee, who had been a reporter, editorial writer and associate editor of The Cleveland Plain Dealer. After a year in San Diego, she joined The Post's staff in the same month that Cooke had written her letter to Bradlee, July, 1979.

"Janet was assigned to various types of stories," Aplin-Brownlee said, "to see how she would develop, to see if she would bring anything new to the story."

Two weeks after she was hired, Cooke's first byline appeared. It was a story about a black beauty contest. Other stories followed rapidly. On Jan. 31 there were four. She was winning the confidence of her editor.

Her first big article appeared on Feb. 21. It was a dramatic story of Washington's drug-infested riot corridor, years after the 1968 disorders, and an hour-by-hour account of a police patrol along 14th Street.

"It was a fine piece of journalism," Aplin-Borwnlee said. "Masterfully written."

The editor had worked with her reporter all week. "She was not really street-savvy," Aplin-Brownlee said. "She didn't know the kinds of people she was dealing with, but she was tenacious and talented."

Janet produced. Fifty-two of her stories appeared in The Post before the ill-fated account of the non-existent "Jimmy."

She was a conspicuous member of the newsroom staff. When she walked, she pranced. When she smiled, she dazzled. Her wardrobe seemed always new, impeccable and limitless. "She has a dramatic flair," Bradlee said.

But there was something else. "She was consumed by blind and raw ambition," Aplin-Borwnlee said. "It was obvious, but it doesn't deny the talent.

"She was Gucci and Cardin and Yves St. Laurent. She went out on that 14th Street story in designer jeans and came back to tell me that somebody asked, 'What kind of nigger are you?' She thought it was funny.

"She had to learn the street.She didn't know what was happening in the nitty-gritty. I was grooming her, training her. It was ironic that she became a reporter of the drug culture."

Cooke grew up in a middle-class home in Toledo, where her father, Stratman Cooke, worked for 35 years for Toledo Edison and is now secretary to the corporation. He remembers that he gave her her first typewriter when she was 5 and that a grade-school teacher said she couldn't believe the poetry Janet wrote. It was that good.

Janet learned quickly about life in an urban slum. Her 14th Street story drew compliments not only from her colleagues, but also Bradlee and Richard Harwood, deputy managing editor, congratulated her.

Janet's ambition was taking shape. She wanted to move to the daily Metro staff, which is responsible for seven-day coverage of local news. Storng, the Metro staff is a favorite of the publisher, Donald Graham.

Graham believes the quality of the Metro staff has improved enormously in the 10 years he has been with the paper. "The city staff particularly has begun to tell us things we didn't understand about this town," Graham said.

Bob Woodward, who is more famous as half of the Woodward and Bernstein reporting team that broke the Watergate story in 1972, has been assistant managing editor for metropolitan news -- the Metro editor -- since May 1, 1979. A tough, determined and persistent administrator, Woodward is frequently the first of The Post's top staff in the office in the morning and among the last to leave at night. He has put the local news section on a fast track, and presides over the largest of The Post's staffs.

Janet Cooke wanted to move quickly. She told Woodward so, and she frequently talked with Milton Coleman, who had succeeded Herb Denton as district editor for the daily staff. Aplin-Brownlee knew of the conversations.

Once when the "Jimmy" story was developing, Cooke told a friend, "This story is my ticket off the Weekly."

While she aspired to the Metro staff, she had bigger ambitions."She set enormous goals for herself," Karlyn Barker, a Metro reporter, said. "She wanted a Pulitzer Prize in three years, and she wanted to be on the national staff in three to five years," Barker said. "She had winner written all over her, although it was strange, every day she acted as though she was protecting her job. She was the last person who needed to do that."

Cooke lived alone in an apartment until December. Then she asked Elsa Walsh, another Weekly reporter, if they might share living quarters. Walsh agreed, but says it didn't work very well.

"Janet was hard to live with, very highstrung," Walsh recalled. "She bought clothes lavishly. Every day she talked about her ambitions. She had no sense of the past or even the present, except for its consequences for the future. She always looked to the future, and she didn't care about the people she left behind."

Cooke had money problems. The check for her deposit on the shared apartment bounced. So did others.

When Walsh asked Cooke about other reporters who doubted the veracity of the "Jimmy" story, she said Cooke replied: "They're just jealous. They are not going to get where I'm going."

Sometime in August of last year, Aplin-Brownlee heard talk of a new type of heroin on the streets of Washington. The drug was said, so she heard, to ulcerate the skin of its users. She asked Cooke to look into it.

During background interviews on the story, Cooke didn't find the new type of heroin, but she found out a lot about the use of heroin in Washington.

Interviewing social workers and drug rehabilitation experts, Cooke amassed extensive notes and taped interviews with intriguing leads. In all, there were two hours of tape-recorded interviews plus 145 pages of handwritten notes plus a collection of pamphlets and documents on drug abuse.

When Aplin-Brownlee saw what Cooke had collected, she immediately said, "This is a story for the daily."

"The daily" is Weekly jargon for the Metro section. Cooke took her notebooks and her ideas to Milton Coleman. Aplin-Brownlee was not to see the story again until it appeared on the front page of The Washington Post of Sept. 28 under the headline, "Jimmy's World."
The Story: First the Idea, and Finally the Presses Rolled

Milton Coleman is a rangy, tall man. His quietness is deceptive. He pursues news as though it's his quarry, and admiring colleagues regard him as highly competitive. When he sits, he sprawls. He likes to work in a vest. He is a relentless jogger, and finished last Sunday's Washington marathon in three hours and 25 minutes, 57 minutes behind the winner.

Coleman arrived at The Washington Post on May 12, 1976. He had been on The Minneapolis Star for two years after Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, a stint in radio news, a job as Washington correspndent for a black news service and three years with the Student Orgnaization for Black Unity.He majored in fine arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

At The Post he reported on Montgomery County and D.C. City Hall before he was named assistant city editor in March of last year. On May 26, 1980, he took over the city desk. He is among the most respected of The Post's editing staff.

When Janet Cooke brought her reporting notes on heroin to Coleman, stories of heroin use in the city were running regularly. Four appeared in August and three in September before "Jimmy's World" was published.

The stories reported on an increase in the crime rate, a drug dealer receiving a 40-year sentence, vast new drug traffic via Turkey, an indictment of a Northeast man on a drug count, hearings on heroin use by patients dying of cancer, a life sentence for a drug-related killing and 19 arrests in two major local drug rings.

"I talked over Janet's materials with her," Coleman said. "She talked about hundreds of people being hooked.And at one point she mentioned an 8-year-old-addict. I stopped her and said, 'That's the story. Go after it. It's a front page story.'

"It appeared that the kid was at RAP Inc., a service organization for drug addicts. I went to Managing Editor [Howard] Simons' office . . . and we talked it through. If RAP gave us permission to talk to the boy, could we reveal the name? We agreed that we would not under any circumstances. Would RAP let us talk with the parents? We didn't know. Janet went back out."

Two weeks passed. On a story of this nature, it is common practice at The Post to give a reporter all the time he or she needs.

Cooke retuned to Coleman and said she couldn't find the boy, but a week later she said she said she had found another young addict. He was 8 years old. "Jimmy's World" was born.

"She told me that she had gone out on the playgrounds, had asked around and had left her cards in a number of places. One of them had found its way to the boy's mother, who had called Janet in anger and asked, 'Why are you looking for my boy?'"

Cooke told Coleman she had talked with the mother again but had reached no agreement on an interview. In answer to her question, Coleman said she could promise the mother anonymity.

"I told her if the mother called again to keep her on the phone, keep talking, talk it through. Be persistant," Coleman said.

Coleman did not ask the mother's name or the family's street address. He had promised Cooke confidenitiality for her sources. The jugular of journalism lay exposed -- the faith an editor has to place in a reporter.

Simons says an editor can ask the name of a source and if a reporter refuses to reveal it the editor has the option to reject a story. He did not ask Cooke or Coleman to reveal any details on identity.

"Janet told me she had been back in touch with the mother and that the two of them were to have dinner at Eastover Shopping Center," Coleman said.

Later Cooke told him she had the dinner and that two days later she visited the mother's house, the same imaginary house she was to describe in great detail as "Jimmy's World."

There were no further interviews with "Jimmy" or his family, she told Coleman. But she said she was worried. "Ron," the invented mother's invented lover, had threatened Cooke, the reporter told her editor. All during the interview, she said, Ron had paced the room with a knife in his hand, and once had said to her, "If I see any police, Miss Lady, or if any police come to see me, we [he glances again at the knife] will be around to see you."

The threat was taken so seriously by Coleman and others at The Post that when Richard Cohen wrote a column after "Jimmy's World" appeared, Coleman insisted that Cohen's reference to the knife be deleted. It was. Simons, whose concern for the staff is nearly parental, wouldn't let Cooke go home for two nights after her story was published. He arranged for her to stay with another Post employe.

When Coleman heard her description of her "interview," he asked her to do a memo on it. On this kind of story, Coleman wants the reporter to write the story roughly but soon after the event, while details are fresh in the reporter's mind.

Cooke's memo, her first draft on the subject, is 13 1/2 pages long, double spaced on letter-sized paper. It contains exhausting detail. "Jimmy" wears a blue and green Izod T-shirt -- "bad, ain't it. I got six of these." There was an eight-foot plaid sofa against one living-room wall, a matching love seat against the other. Both were covered in plastic. There was a color television set in the room, along with a lot of Panasonic stereo eqipment, "receiver, tape deck." There was a rubber tree plant, fake bamboo blinds, a brown shag rug, two lamps, a chrome and glass coffee table and a chrome and glass end table.

At this point, Coleman saw the name "Tyrone" on the memo, and determined that this was the fictitious child's "real" first name. He was also told the elementary school "Tyrone" attended and the general neighborhood where he supposedly lived. This was reassuring at the time, and later translated into general newsroom gossip that Coleman knew who the child was.

Other editors did not ask, then or later. Managing editor Simons had earlier given Cooke assurances that she could keep the family anonymous, according to Coleman, who said, "Howard said she should deal with me and tell me the child's identity. 'I don't want to know,' he said, somewhat jokingly."

"None of them asked me for the name," Coleman remembers. "I may have been asked, do you believe it?"

Cooke's descriptive language was convincing to Coleman, but Woodward was to say later that if he had seen the first draft he might have asked questions about the long and seemingly perfect quotations. Woodward never looked at the first rough draft until Cooke's Pulitzer was in question.

Coleman, who knows the streets better than Woodward, said he found no reason to question the quotes. "Ron" is quoted as saying, for example, "He'd be bugging me all the time about what the shots were, what people was doin' and one day he said, 'When can I get off.' I said well s---, you can have some now. I let him snort a little and damn, it was wild. The little dude really did get off."

Coleman read it over, made suggestions on reworking it, suggested how to write the "lead," the opening, how to rearrange the material.

"I wanted it to read like John Coltrane's music, strong. It was a great story, and it never occured to me that she could make it up. There was too much distance between Janet and the streets," Coleman said.

When the second draft came in, Coleman called in Bob Barkin, The Post's art director, to illustrate the story. Obviously there would be no photographs. It was Friday, Sept. 19, nine days before the story was to be published.

Barkin selected illustrator Michael Gnatek Jr. for the drawing. Bradlee was later to find the full illustration so powerful in its horror that he insisted it run inside the paper. "People are eating breakfast while they read the paper, you know," he said.

The full drawing ran on page A9, only a smaller drawing of "Jimmy" ran on the front page. It shows a young man, his face twisted in a half-smile, huge eyes watching, his slender arm gripped by a huge fist as a needle is injected.

Coleman did some checking of his own. He found someone who knew, and asked if Janet's description of "shooting up" is the way it's done. He wanted to know if, as the story said, liquid ebbs out of the syringe, and is replaced by red blood, which is then reinjected. He was satisfied with how the answers agreed with Janet's account.

Bo Jones is The Post's counsel.He and his associate, Carol Weisman, are frequently called in to "lawyer" a story, particularly those dealing with subjects that might have legal implications.

Jones suggested some changes. "Ron" was said to be from Atlanta. Jones suggested making it "from the South," because "Ron" might be traceable in Atlanta, and the promise of anonymity was absolute. Jones also suggested striking out "public housing." That, also, could be traced, he said.

Woodward saw the story for the first time. He divides stories into two categories: possible libel or criminal charges and all others. "Jimmy" fell into Woodward's category two. It could not libel because its subjects were anonymous.

"Janet had written a great piece," Woodward says. "In a way, both she and the story were almost too good to be true. I had seen her go out on a complicated story and an hour later turn in a beautifully written piece. This story was so well-written and tied together so well that my alarm bells simply didn't go off. My skepticism left me. I was personally negligent."

Woodward called in Cooke and asked her to tell him about it. He simply wanted to hear her story. "She was a terrific actress, terrific," he said. She related it all in the most disarming way. It was so personal, so dramatic, so hard in her tummy."

None of the Post's senior editors subjected Cooke's story to close questioning. Simons was on vacation in Florida the week before it appeared. Deputy managing editor Richard Harwood had no role in its preparation. Ben Bradlee read the story that week and thought it was "a helluva job."

Are they satisfied with the preliminary screening on "Jimmy's World"? Simons answered: "Yes, there was no reason to disbelieve the story." Bradlee said: "I am not satisfied now -- but I was then."

Coleman, who was editing Cooke's copy, reflects on this: "Much of my attention was concentrated on the story and formulating it. Subconsciously, I think I firmly believed that the extra eyes of the backup system would catch anything that I missed."

Now Coleman believes other editors were relying on him. "We never really debated whether or not it was true," he said. "I think -- if I can gore my own ox -- they kind of took it for granted that Coleman should know."

Art and story were complete. Bradlee had the weekend duty. He said again that it was a front page story. He thought it was terrific. The story, colors flying, had passed its last and most powerful filter.

Janet Cooke had one last chance to change her mind. On Friday night, before the story was to run on Sunday, Coleman called her in. Simons had gone out of town, but before he left, he insisted that Coleman have a talk with the reporter.

"I told her what Simons told me to say. He's almost romantic about this kind of thing," Coleman said. "I said she had written a story that is certain to be controversial. You have seen a crime and you may be subpoenaed. We don't think so, but you can.You should know that The Post will stand behind you 100 percent. If you are subpoenaed, and you refuse to reveal your sources, you may be found in contempt of court and have to spend time in jail. Before the story goes, if you don't want to face that, we won't run it. Think it over, tell me in the morning."

Saturday morning Cooke told Coleman to let it go.

The article had been held for Sunday publication. There is more space for long stories -- "Jimmy's World" ran 2,256 words -- and there are more readers -- 892,220 copies of the paper ran on Sunday, Sept. 28. "Jimmy's World" was on the front page. The presses started running at 9:54 p.m.
THE PUBLICATION: 'Jimmy' Hit Washington Like a Grenade, and Bounced

Jimmy's story struck at Washington's heart. The paper had no sooner reached the streets than The Washington Post's telephone switchboard lit up like a space launch control room.

Readers were outraged. The story was described as racist and criminal. the concern was for Jimmy. "What about the boy?" was the central question. It was repeated for the next four days in as many versions as the human mind can invent.

By Monday, Washington Police Chief Burtell Jefferson had launched a mammoth citywide search. He had called on his youth division to get to work Sunday. Mayor Marion Barry was incensed. All schools, social services and police contacts were to be asked for "Jimmy's" whereabouts. The word went out on the streets that big reward money was available. Last week Assistant Chief Maurice Turner said the police had been prepared to offer up to $10,000.

The Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service moved the story out to 300 clients. "Jimmy" was national, then international.

Much later, after Ronald Reagan was elected president, Donnie Radcliffe of The Post's Style staff sent a copy of the story to the nation's first-lady-to-be. Radcliffe thought it would be useful information as the Reagans prepared to come to Washington.

Nancy Reagan wrote back " . . . How terribly sad to read it and to know there are so many others like him out there. I hope with all my heart I can do something to help them. Surely there must be a way . . ."

It would be difficult to overestimate Washington's compassion for "Jimmy" or its anger when The Post refused to reveal his identity or address.

Police were receiving letters from all over the country, including one signed by 30 students in a Richmond school, pleading that they find "Jimmy."

At one point, as Milton Coleman and Howard Simons had predicted, police threatened to subpoena Janet Cooke in an effort to force her to reveal names and addresses.

At The Post, Simons sent out instructions that if the police got a search warrant no member of the staff was to resist. Cooke, while not staying at her apartment, was to be at work, on the newsroom floor, and out on some part of the follow-up story.

Coleman established an 11-member reporting team for the follow-up. Five of them were assigned to the breaking story. With these five, the other six men were given a different assignment. They were to search for another "Jimmy," on the theory that if there is one, there must be others.

Cooke and fellow Metro reporter Courtland Milloy were one of the teams searching for the second young addict.

The Post's telephones never stopped ringing. Between 50 and 60 letters to the editor arrived.

At first the mayor announced that the city knew "Jimmy" and his family and that he was under medical treatment, which he had been receiving for some time. Later that statement proved premature.

By the following weekend, Coleman was uneasy. It was a slight feeling, but it was real. "I thought the police would have found him in three days at the outside. I'm not one of those people who believe the police can't do anything right. They could find him. I knew it."

Courtland Milloy was also worried. He and Cooke had gone out to find the second "Jimmy."

"We were supposed to be finding another kid," Milloy said. "But I'll tell you the truth, I wanted to find Jimmy. Hell, that kid needed help. So as we drove around I circled through Condon Terrace, the general area where Janet said he lived.

"It didn't take long to see that she didn't know the area. It's one of the toughest sections in town. I know it well. She said she didn't see the house. I asked her if it was to the right of us, the left of us, or had we passed it. She didn't know.

"We went to other areas where you can find dealers on the street, and I wanted to go back to Condon Terrace but Janet's life had been threatened. I didn't want to take any chances."

Milloy's serious doubts about the story began there.When he and Cooke had looked for seven hours they returned to the office. Milloy went to Coleman and said, "I think you ought to buy me a drink."

The next day, Coleman did, and Milloy told him about his growing disbelief in Cooke's story.

Milloy went further. "I wanted to find 'Jimmy.' I mean, does The Post sanction a reporter watching a kid getting shot up? Even the Condon Terrace people were calling offering to help.

"I got a call from the 'Queen of the Underworld' [about whom Milloy had written on the same Sunday Cooke's story ran], and she asked if she could help. She wanted to find that kid, man."

Coleman listened respectfully, but was "leery" of Milloy's conclusions. "I thought part of his doubting might be jealousy," he said. "But also I got the distinct impression from him and from Jan that he was concerned with our making sure that the child was identified and turned over to authorities. My concern at that time [was] for protecting the reporter on this story . . ."

Coleman does remember relaying Milloy's doubts to the metropolitan editor and the managing editor.

Four days after the story ran, the telephone calls to The Post changed. They were now asking, in great numbers, what the police were doing. Why weren't they finding Jimmy, and what were they doing about the drug traffic?

The intense police search continued for 17 days. The city had been finely combed. Nothing.

On Oct. 15, Mayor Barry said, "We're kind of giving up on that." It remained an open case.

"I've been told the story is part myth, part reality," Barry said. "We all have agreed that we don't believe that the mother or the pusher would allow a reporter to see them shoot up."

Were Bradlee and Simons worried by City Hall's claim that the story was untrue? Both said they felt the weight of criticism, but were reassured by the fact that at one point the mayor had said city officials had found such a child.

Bradlee says he remembers going to either Woodward or Coleman and asking if there was anything that should be rechecked, and being reassured by the answers he got.

The Post stuck by its story and what it described as its First Amendment rights to protect its sources.

"At any rate," Coleman recalls, "I voiced my concerns to Howard [Simons], and he said in so many words that they were legitimate. But he urged me to find the most creative way to examine them, stressing that I more than anyone else had to stand by my reporter. At the point that I even began to hint to her that I thought she had not been truthful, her trust in me could be destroyed."

Simons says, "I have no memory of either Coleman or Woodward discussing Milloy's disbelief with me at that point."

In the paper's newsroom, where doubts about the story were beginning to thump faintly, there were congratulations and commendations for Cooke.

Publisher Don Graham wrote her a note on Oct. 7: "With all the turmoil of the last week, it's important that one say the basic thing: not only was that a very fine story in Sunday's paper a week ago, it was only one of many you've done in the last year.

"The Post has no more important and tougher job than explaining life in the black community in Washington. A special burden gets put on black reporters doing that job, and a double-special burden on black reporters who try to see life through their own eyes instead of seeing it the way they're told they should. The Post seems to have many such reporters. You belong very high up among them.

"If there's any long-term justification for what we do, it's that people will act a bit differently and think a bit differently if we help them understand the world even slightly better. Much of what we write fails that first test because we don't understand what we're writing about ourselves.

"You seem to have much more than the common measure of understanding and the ability to explain what you see. It's a great gift.

"And you went through your tests of last week with what seemed to me world-class composure. Sincerely, Don."

On Monday morning after "Jimmy's World" appeared, Woodward walked over to Vivian Aplin-Brownlee's desk and said Janet Cooke was now a member of the Metro daily staff. Aplin-Brownlee was furious. She had lost her most experienced reporter.
THE DOUBTS: From the Very First Moment, Some Suspected the Worst

From the day "Jimmy's" story appeared there were doubts about it. Milton Coleman felt misgivings first when the police couldn't find the boy, Courtland Milloy when he accompanied Janet Cooke on a trip through the area where the youngster was supposed to live.

There were others. Mayor Marion Barry was one. Dr. Alyce Gullattee, director of Howard University's Institute for Substance Abuse and Addiction, was another. She was one of the people Cooke interviewed when she was gathering her original material.

In a telephone call with Pat Tyler, then of The Washington Post's metro staff, Gullattee said the story had caused a panic in the community to the extent that addicts were hunkered down, afraid to go out to seek treatment out of fear that they will run afoul of swarms of police looking for the 8-year-old.

Gullattee also said she didn't believe any of those people "fired up" in front of Cooke. Junkies, she said, just don't trust reporters like that.

Elsa Walsh, Cooke's roommate, doubted. She had gone through Cooke's notes once and found nothing on "Jimmy."

But there was more. "She's the kind of person who has fears for her own safety," Walsh said. "My own instincts told me it was wrong. She would have real trouble going into the 'Jimmy' setting. And then, when I tried to put what I know of Janet together with the story itself, they wouldn't fit." She did not express these misgivings to any editors.

Among the strongest doubters was Vivian Aplin-Brownlee of the District Weekly, who was Janet's first editor at The Post. She had not been in touch with the story since it was turned over to the Metro staff.

"I had been tough on Janet. She knew it and I knew it," Aplin-Brownlee said. "But when I first read the story I was astonished. I thought it was going to be about the use of heroin that causes skin ulcers. That's what it started out to be.

"I never believed it, and I told Milton that. I knew her so well and the depth of her. In her eagerness to make a name she would write farther than the truth would allow.

"When challenged on facts on other stories, Janet would reverse herself, but without dismay or consternation with herself.

"I knew she would be tremendously out of place in a 'shooting gallery.' I didn't believe she could get access. No pusher would shoot up a child in her presence.

"Some of the language didn't ring true. What 8-year-old in 'Jimmy's' circumstances would make a connection between math and drugs?" (As the story claimed.)

On the day Cooke's Pulitzer Prize was announced, Aplin-Brownlee went to Coleman and said, "I hope she has committed the perfect crime."

When the hoax became known, Coleman went back to Aplin-Brownlee and said, "It wasn't the perfect crime after all."

In mid-November, Cooke was working on another sensational story, promising to produce the story of a 14-year-old prosititute, and when Alpin-Brownlee heard about it, she told Coleman, "She's about to do it to you again. Why would a 14-year-old hooker and her 20-year-old pimp sit down with Janet at a restaurant in Georgetown?"

Still, after she first expressed her incredulity to Coleman, she didn't go back to him. Relations between the two were strained.

"He said he believed the story," Aplin-Browlee recalls now. "I didn't have to ask why. He believed it because he wanted to."

Aplin-Brownlee said she felt that Coleman had raided her District Weekly staff when Cooke was assigned to Metro after the "Jimmy" story. It was what Woodward called a battlefield promotion.

Skepticism from people like Milloy and Aplin-Brownlee triggered newsroom rumors about "Jimmy" that wouldn't go away. Woodward didn't doubt the story, although he and Coleman talked about those who did. "I was blown away by the story," Woodward said. "Milt seemed satisfied that by now he had a name. I was also reassured by a letter to the editor The Post published" (on Nov. 10.).

Dr. William Hamlin of Washington had written, ". . . The Washington metropolitan area, as well as hundreds of other large metropolitan areas around the country, are full of Jimmys. I know. I work with them. . . ."

"Milt did think that failed trip Janet had with Courtland was bizarre," Woodward said. "That thought should have set off alarms for me. It didn't. I told Milt I believed the story."

Woodward was inclined to dismiss the doubters, attributing their skepticism to "professional jealousy."

Still, the two editors did take some precautions. As Cooke pursued the "hooker" story, they insisted that Coleman meet with the subject of the story, mainly to protect Cooke from more staff jealousies and to establish once and for all the soundness of her reporting. Cooke kept arranging times and places for such a meeting, but they were all canceled.

"I attached no particular significance to this," Woodward said, "but it was mildly troubling."

Meanwhile, something else was filtering into The Post's reaction. It felt it was under attack. Angry words from the mayor and the police chief were reaching the staff's pride. Charges of irresponsibility from the public were tough to take. Woodward said it best, "We went into our Watergate mode: protect the source and back the reporter."

When the threat of legal action by the police department came up, publisher Dan Graham went by Coleman's desk one day and asked, "Is there anything we should check out?"

Neither of them quite remembers Coleman's reply, but, in part, Coleman remembers describing Cooke's gripping account of her visit to "Jimmy's" home. Graham went away satisfied.

About three weeks after the story appeared, Simons called Coleman and said, "That kid is still out there and nobody's looking for him. Let's find him. Take Janet with you."

Coleman told Cooke about the plan, but they didn't get to it right away. A day later, Cooke went to Coleman and said she had gone to the house and found it vacant. The family had moved to Baltimore, she said, and there was no reason for the two of them to make a trip to "Jimmy's" house.

While Coleman had been troubled that the police were unable to find the boy, Woodward found that unremarkable. "It seemed logical," he said, "that his mother would take him away to Baltimore or wherever."

But Coleman was infuriated. He went to managing editor Simons and spilled out his anger. For the first time, Simons felt misgivings about the story. "But all I had was a hunch and the fact that she had ducked the visit. How do you prove a negative?" he said.

The faith of an editor in his reporter that is a principal connector in all the events of the episode was upheld. Skepticism was put aside.

Bradlee says that throughout he was unaware of the skepticism. "Nobody ever came in this room and said, "I have doubts about the story' -- before or after publication -- and nobody said someone else had misgivings about the story," Bradlee said.

One editor who had early misgivings was deputy metro editor David Maraniss, who also serves as Maryland editor. He read the story on vacation and didn't feel it quite added up. Since it was not his territory and criticism might be viewed as poaching, Maraniss did not take his questions to Woodward until much later.

Uncertainties and misgivings among the newsroom staff persisted. Some of them found their way to Coleman, Woodward or Simons, but apparently made no strong impression. Looking back on it with reporters now, they seem to agree that they didn't have enough to go on. They felt they couldn't press the case without evidence, and none was available. As late as February, Metro reporters were still going to editors with their concerns, and were told that Coleman knew sho "Jimmy" was.

When the hoax was exposed, their doubts about the story and their frustration with management burst out in a meeting of the Metro staff at Woodward's house last Thursday night. Coleman says now:

". . . There was undoubtedly also some degree of pride -- we had published the story in the first place and stood by it. We probably put too much faith in the hope that maybe things were not the way so many indicators suggested they might be."

Woodward, likewise, feels negligent. "Questions were clearly out there," he said. "Maraniss and Coleman were my channels of information. I should have sat them down together and reviewed everything and then taken it to Simons and Bradlee. Though I had a vague idea that Coleman and Simons had talked about the questions, I never recall talking with Simons about it. I don't think I ever once took the matter up with Bradlee, who was apparently left in ignorance about the doubts swirling around."

Meanwhile, Aplin-Brownlee says that Cooke was having migraine headaches and stayed out of the office more than usual.
THE OMBUDSMAN: After the Agony, the Reappraisal

I wrote this story of "Jimmy World" after being invited to do so by The Washington Post's executive editor, Ben Bradlee. It is important to understand the verb, "invited," because if I had been assigned to do it, that would have violated the relationship The Post has maintained with its ombudsmen for over a decade.

The central idea is autonomy for the person who sits in this chair. Without it, the ombudsman would be a fake, like "Jimmy." With it, The Post takes its chances, as it should. I have been filling this role at The Post since September, and will return in August to my regular work in the administration of Duke University.

All of which is to say that this piece is my own. Twenty Post reporters discussed the one-man undertaking Wednesday afternoon and didn't like it. They wanted the story staffed, as The Wall Street Journal did with its account of "Jimmy" that appeared Friday. I turned the reporters away, although it would have been great to have them share the work. But I am grateful that they volunteered.

There are omissions in this article, perhaps some errors too. The most glaring omission is the absence of an interview with Janet Cooke.She refused to see me. I don't think she was trying to be evasive. I think she simply didn't want to go over it again with a stranger now. The pain has simply been too great. Where Cooke is quoted directly in this account, the words are attributed to the editors or reporters who were in conversation with her.

I regret her decision because her version of the whole episode should be here. No doubt, it would differ in some respects from this account.

After the agony of this week, deputy met metropolitan editor David Maraniss, who has grown close to Cooke and feels protective of her, reports that she is doing better, seems to understand what she has done, and is feeling remorseful. "By Friday," he said, "she was beautiful again."

Four Post employes were involved in producing this story, all of them at my request. Noel Epstein, assistant editor of Outlook, and Ron Shaffer of the Metro staff did some research, none of the writing. William Greider, assistant managing editor for national news, edited it. He changed nothing without my approval. Robin Gradison, a news aide, supplied research and good cheer and coffee for four days. She was terrific.

The Post's attitude toward this project was summarized in the catch phrase, "full disclosure." That word went out to the staff from Bradlee and publisher Donald Graham.

The result was that every question I asked about The Post's handling of "Jimmy" got an answer. Maraniss declined to relate his off-the-reocrd conversations with Cooke. Other than that, no one refused to answer my questions.

The most impressive reaction was from the news staff members who filed in and out of my office offering help. I am willing to lay odds that no sentence in this piece was written without interruption except those that were typed between midnight Friday and 8 a.m. yesterday.
The Prize: Of Fiefdoms and Their Knights and Ladies of Adventure

The Washington Post has 493 employes on its news staff.At the top of the pyramid is the executive editor, Ben Bradlee. His second-in-command and alter ego is the managing editor, Howard Simons. Third in line is the deputy managing editor, Richard Harwood.

They constitute the presiding troika, and they split the duties of top news administration, rotating, for example, weekend duties. They are the last port of call for news decisions. Normally, Bradlee and Simons preside over daily 2:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. story conferences. Harwood is responsible for the Sunday interpretative section, "Outlook," and The Washington Post Magazine, among other duties.

Bradlee is luminescent, Simons and Harwood, philosophical. All three are former reporters, a characteristic of most Post editors.

Below them are the archdukes and duchesses of the newsroom, the assistant managing editors, 12 of them, nine with news staffs. The other three are responsible for personnel, administration and special projects. oAll are called AMEs.

Below them on the organization chart are various levels of other editors: earls, counts, countesses, viscounts, barons.

Then there are the reporters, the knight adventurers or lady adverturers. They writer the copy.

So prestigious is The Post among journalists and would-be journalists in this country and abroad that one could feel comfortable betting that the entire staff could be replaced, at least numerically, once a month by the applications the paper receives.

The Post calls its news administration a federal system. That is intended to indicate, and does, the enormous latitude and authority that is given to the assistant managing editors, the archdukes.

They pull together budgets and administer them, decide on stories, hire and fire (but only with the agreement from the troika), reward and punish, and -- importantly -- congregate every day for the story conferences. When Bradlee or Simons wants to issue instructions, the assistant managing editors get the word and pass it along.

The archduke of the Metro section is Bob Woodward. He presides over 108 employes, a quarter of the entire news staff. He has been in the job for just short of two years, having assumed it after completing the most recent of his three best-selling books, The Brethren, an account of the decision-making process of the Supremne Court that he co-authored with Post national reporter Scott Armstrong.

Woodward's name has been synonymous with investigative reporting since Watergate.

"Jimmy" was created, lived and vanished in Woodward's shop.

Among the rewards in which AMEs play a key role are nominations for the prizes of journalism. On Nov. 17, 1980, the AME for administration, Elsie Caper, set out a memo asking for nominations. Her list contained 73 award possibilities. Leading the list, as always were the Pulitzer Prizes, which are awarded in 12 categories. Winners become the nobility of American journalism. The Post has won Pulitzers 16 times.

On Woodward's Metro staff, there was competition for Pulitzer nominations. It is not uncommon at The Post. David Maraisa, the Maryland editor, was pushing hard for a series by the of his Maryland reporters, Neil Henry, as an entry in the feature category.

He was so depressed when he found that Henry would be nominated in another category that he seriously considered resigning. The Post's feature nominations were to go to Sally Quinn (Ben Bradlee' wife), Myra McPherson and Henry Mitchell of the Style section, where most Post features appear, and Tom Boswell of the sports staff.

Meanwhile, Milton Coleman, Woodward's city editor, was pushing Janet Cooke's "Jimmy's World." In a memo to Woodward on Dec. 10 he also suggested that the story be nominated for the Sigma Delta Chi award, the Heywood Brown award, the Ellis Willis Scipps award and as one of a package submission for the Robert F. Kennedy award.

Coleman's memo described "Jimmy's World" as readable, accurate and complete. "I can't think of another story that shows more enterprise and resourcefulness on the part of a reporter in overcoming obstacles."

There was already strain between Coleman and Maraniss. Coleman thought Maraniss encroached on his territory by giving directions to the city staff. Maraniss disagreed.

"Jimmy's World" was The Post's sole entry for local news reporting. Maraniss' entry was one of two nominations in the category for Local Investigative Reporting and Other Specialized Reporting," It didn't win.

"Jimmy's World" was also entered for a prize from the Maryland-D.C. Press Association. It won second prize.

Beore the entries were sent off, indeed while the nominations were being considered, doubts among the staff aboout Cook's story rose to new intensity.

This time, even Maraniss was involved. After a dinner with investigative reporter Jonathan Naumann, Maraniss re-read the story, and this time it didn't ring true. He found he couldn't believe it. He said that to Woodward, and suggested that Woodward re-read the story before it was nominated. In hindsight he said he thinks he didn't put it as strongly as he he might have. He didn't want to appear to be knocking down a story Coleman liked so much.

Neumann, who had won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting for The Philadelphia Inquirer, was a principal in discussions among other reporters. "A number of people felt strongly that it should not be nominated because it could disgrace us," he said. "A couple of dozen people talked abut it but we didn't go to top editors. I think we felt it wouldn't be fair to put her on the carpet when we couldn't prove anything."

With all the doubts about the "Jimmy" story, how could it have been submitted, with The Post's full backing, to the Pulitzer committee?

Woodward, who accepted Coleman's urgings and strongly supported the story to Bradlee, Simons and Harwood, says it most tellingly: "I have used the phrases 'in for a dime, in for a dollar' to describe my overall conclusion about submitting the Cooke story for a Pulitzer or any other prize.

"I believed it, we published it. Official questions had been raised, but we stood by the story and her. Internal questions had been raised, but none about her other work. The reports were about the story not sounding right, being based on anonymous sources, and primarily about purported lies [about] her personal life -- [told by men reporters], two she had dated and one who felt in close competition with her.

"I think that the decision to nominate the story for a Pulitzer is of minimal consequence. I also think that it won is of little consequence. It is a brilliant story -- fake and fraud that it is.

"It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes.

"If so, our posture would be as follows: we published the story and said it was true, but now we are going to nominate it for a Pulitzer -- now that's serious business."

Bradlee, Simons and Harwood made the final decisions on Pulitzer nominations in early January. Did Bradlee, Simons or Harwood know of any of this skepticism about Cooke's reporting?

"No, I knew of none," Bradlee said.

Harwood said he didn't know of any , either.

"I didn't know of any staff doubts," said Simmons, who had been told months earlier of some criticism, "but I had some of my own. I had reason to disbelieve. And Woodward supported the nomination strongly."

All 12 cateories were entered. The paper was to win one.

When the prize of "Jimmy's World" was announced, all of the top editors, Woodward and Coleman were jubilant. So were the undoubters among the news staff. Publisher Donald Graham wrote his second note to Cooke:

"Dear Janet:

"Hooray. I've never heard a prize announcement make people so happy. People here like you. They think you're the kind of journalist The Post needs for its future because you understand people and you get a part of their nature into your stories. And all thinking readers of the page know that the city coverage has been getting much, much better for five years. This flash of recognition for you (and Woodward, Miklton, Stan, Vivian and all others involved in your career here) feels mightily like vindication. Milton and the entire staff have taken so much abuse (you as much as anyone) for trying to do the job professionally. Your prize seems to me to say that we're on the right track in writing about this city and it's strong encouragement to do even better. Don."
THE CONFESSION: At the End, There Were the Questions, Then the Tears

Pulitzer Prize decisions were made on April 3. Formal announcement was scheduled 10 days later, but two members of the advisory board called Ben Bradlee within hours after the decisions were final. He was elated, and called both Bob Woodward and Milton Coleman.

Janet Cooke was in New Haven working on the Reagan shooting story, and John W. Hinckley Jr. Woodward and Coleman reached her by telephone.

Later, she told an interviewer, laughing, "It was right on deadline when they called. I thought they were calling because I hadn't filed the story yet, and all I could think of was, 'Oh, God, is it possible to get fired from 600 miles away?'"

Executive editor Bradlee got on the telephone and repeated the message. "Even then, I wasn't convinced," she said.

Finally persuaded, she faced an evening alone. She said she bought a bottle of champaign, called her mother and watched "Dallas" in her motel room.

The public announcement of the awards was on April 13. At The Toledo Blade that day, in the words of executive news editor Joe O'Conor, "We have an edition that goes to press shortly after 8 a.m. In it, we had a sidebar on Miss Cooke and her Toledo background.

"Sometime later that day, one of the editors showed me a copy of the AP's biographical sketches on Pulitzer winners. The information in it did not jibe with our information, so we did what we would normally do: we pointed out to AP that our information and theirs didn't mesh."

At the Associated Press the story moved to Louis D. Boccardi, vice president and executive editor in New York. He said:

"Tuesday morning, The Toledo Blade pointed out to our correspondent in Toledo that there were discrepancies between our account of Miss Cooke's educational background and what they knew to be the truth.

"More specifically, the background we carried, which was given by The Post to the Pulitzer committee, said that she had a master's degree from the University of Toledo, an undergraduate degree from Vassar, and had studied at the Sorbonne."

Michael Holmes, the AP's correspondent in Toledo, started his own checking, and confirmed the Blades's facts. He reported to his New York office. From there a message went to Paris to check the Sorbonne connection, and a call was made to Cooke at The Post.

"Miss Cooke said, essentially, that the information in her official biography was correct. At this point, it was quite clear that something was wrong, and so we pressed our efforts on the story," Boccardi said.

The "official" biography released by the Pulitzer committee and carried on the AP wire came from a standard Post biographical form that had been attached to her nomination for the prize.

Cooke filled it out. Nobody on The Post checked it, yet it differed significantly from the resume she had filed for the Post when she applied for a job.

The new resume claimed that she spoke or read French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Her original resume claimed only French and Spanish. The new form claimed she had won six awards from the Ohio Newspaper Women's Association and another from the Ohio AP. Her first resume claimed only a single award from the Ohio Newspaper Women's Association. The new form also showed that she graduated magna cum laude from Vassar in 1976, attended the Sorbonne in 1975 and received a master's degree from the University of Toledo in 1977. The original made no reference to the Sorbonne.

Vassar records show that she attended classes there for one year. She was graduated from the University of Toledo, but received no master's degree.

Between 3 and 3:30 Tuesday afternoon telephones in managing editor Howard Simons' and Bradlee's office rang simultaneously. Boccardi was calling Simons, and Dixie Sheridan, assistant to the president of Vassar, was calling Bradlee. Sheridan's call was prompted by the AP queries she had received.

The callers asked Bradlee and Simons the same questions: what did they know about the records discrepancies? Neither of the editors had an answer.

Simons summoned Woodward, Coleman and Tom Wilkinson to Bradlee's office. Wilkinson, The Post's assistant managing editor for personnel, brought Janet's personnel folder and the Pulitzer biography.

"When we saw the papers, we knew we had a problem," Simons said. He and Bradlee decided that the first thing to go after was the Vassar records discrepancies.

To do that, they dispatched Coleman to take Cooke for a walk around the block and talk to her.

"Take her to the woodshed," Bradlee said, borrowing a phrase Lyndon B. Johnson once used on Hubert H. Humphrey. He meant: ask her every question, get it right.

Coleman and Cooke walked across L Street to the Capitol Hilton Hotel. In the bar they ordered two ginger ales, and Coleman questioned her persistently on her background. Why was Vassar saying she only attended classes there one year when Cooke was saying she had been graduated?

Cooke said she didn't know.

"Okay, let's call Vassar," Coleman suggested at one point. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, and he was afraid the college's registrar's office might close.

"I don't see why it is so important," Cooke said. "The Vassar records are just me. The 'Jimmy' story is something I did."

Coleman, after Cooke told him where Vassar is located, reached Judy Blom, a clerk in the registrar's office. She informed Coleman that Cooke was never graduated from the school. Coleman asked to speak to her supervisor, and was transferred to Margaret Battistoni, administrative assistant to the registrar. She confirmed the clerk's response.

Coleman looked at Cooke, who said she had records to prove her claim, that her mother had the papers.

"Let's call Toledo," Coleman said, meaning the University. But Cooke wanted to talk to her mother, and did, for 15 or 20 minutes, while Coleman stood by.

After that conversation Cooke said, "Let's talk." They returned to the bar and ordered two more ginger ales.

Cooke told Coleman that Vassar was right, that she had gone there but had run into emotional problems and returned home the following year to enter the University of Toledo, where she had been graduated.

"Then that part of your resume is wrong," Coleman said.

"Yes."

"What about languages? Do you speak four languages?"

"Yes."

"And the Sorbonne, were you there?"

"Yes."

"And the 'Jimmy' story?"

"It's true."

When Coleman went to the telephone to call Woodward, a member of the city school board happened to be at the next pay phone, and Coleman told Woodward he would have to speak in code.

"Vassar?" Woodward asked.

"Not true," Coleman answered.

"Jimmy?"

"She says it's true."

At the Post, Bradlee suggested that Coleman be asked to bring Cooke back into The Post at the L Street entrance to avoid being conspicuous and to take her to the vacant eighth-floor office of The Post's corporate president. Bradlee and Woodward joined Cooke and Coleman there. Simons stayed in the fifth floor newsroom to conduct the daily 6:30 story conference.

When Bradlee and Woodward arrived, Cooke was seated on a sofa, crying and saying, "You get caught at the stupidest things."

Bradlee shook her hand, then came on strong. He, Simons and Woodward had decided while Coleman and Cooke were out that the record's discrepancies cast serious doubts on her honesty and that her honesty, or lack of it, was the only thing that held the "Jimmy" story together.

Janet was crying harder, and Bradlee began to check off her language proficiency. "Say two words to me in Portuguese," he said. She said she couldn't.

"Do you have any Italian?" Bradlee asked.

Cooke said no.

Bradlee, fluent in French, asked her questions in the language. Her answers were stumbling. Bradlee said later that it sounded as if she had once some high school instruction.

Bradlee made an accusing comparison with Richard M. Nixon: "You're like Richard Nixon -- you're trying to cover up." Later, the executive editor said it was one of the most unpleasant conversations he'd ever had. He asked about the six Ohio journalism awards, and Cooke's answers were inconclusive.

Bradlee asked about Jimmy's identity. Tuesday was the first time Post editors had been told his full name, "Tyrone Davis." His mother and her boyfriend, they were told, were named Candi Davis and Robert Jackson Anderson, and they lived on Xenia Street. This was the first time any of them had been told where "Jimmy" supposedly lived.

"You've got 24 hours to prove the 'Jimmy' story is true," Bradley said.

Now it was Woodward's turn to get tough. "I don't believe you on the 'Jimmy' story," he said.

"You don't believe me," Cooke replied.

"No, I don't, and I'm going to prove it if it's the last thing I do." It was the first time Woodward had said that even to himself.

Bradlee and Woodward left the room, and decided the next best step was to send Coleman and Cooke to Xenia Street in an effort to establish whether she did know the precise location where the "Jimmy" story had its origins. Once again, Coleman and Cooke left, this time driving.

Bradlee, Simons, publisher Donald Graham and Woodward reassembled in Bradlee's office. Graham asked if it was really safe to send Coleman and Cooke to Xenia Street, and was told that it had to be done.

David Maraniss, deputy Metro editor and one of those who had earlier doubted the story, joined the group. Maraniss had known Cooke since shortly after she arrived at The Post, although he was never her editor. Genial and respected as an editor, Maraniss develops close relationships with his staff. He and Cooke had had lunch several times, and he had gone over her stories informally at times. His friendship was to prove crucial during the evening.

Bradlee and Graham went to dinner at Mel Krupin's restaurant as Cooke's notes and tapes for the Jimmy story arrived at The Post. The documents had been held in safekeeping in the law offices of Williams & Connolly since shortly after the story was published.

Woodward, Maraniss and Wilkinson began the laborious job of going over 145 pages of hand-written notes and listening to her tape-recorded interviews. It was the background for the "Jimmy" story, but this was the first time that any editor at The Post had inspected her materials. Woodward said later that he saw "echoes" of the published story all through her notes, but no indication that she had actually interviewed a child using heroin.

While the three editors were poring over the tapes and notes, Coleman called. He said they couldn't find "Jimmy's" house, and Coleman later said that when Cooke failed to identify a house, that fact convinced him the story was a fake. Now, everbody dealing with Cooke believed she was lying. But she stuck with her story.

The editors called Elsa Walsh, Cooke's roommate since mid-December, who was covering a city council meeting in Alexandria for the Virginia Weekly. She drove to The Post and told an editor, for the first time, that she had never believed the "Jimmy" story. Once, she said, she had looked through Cooke's "Jimmy" notes and found none about the boy. She also recalled that Cooke had once told her that she was valedictorian at Vassar. Walsh had not gone to an editor with her doubts.

While Coleman and Cooke drove back to the office, Bradlee and Simons went home. It was 11:30 p.m.. Both left instructions to be notified if anything developed.

Coleman and Cooke joined Woodward, Maraniss and Wilkinson in The Post's fifth floor conference room, and the questioning continued.

"Janet looked awful," Maraniss said. "Her eyes were glassy, her face contorted, and she seemed not to know what word would come out before she said it."

Woodward led the questioning. "It's all over," he said to Cooke. "You've got to come clean.The notes show us the story is wrong. We know it. We can show you point by point how you concocted it."

"I was tough," Woodward said later, "but I was convinced we had to finish it up with Janet."

Wilkinson told Cooke he was concerned for her. Woodward continued to say that he knew she had faked the story, even though she had done it brilliantly.

"This is getting too cruel," Cooke said. "All I have left is my story."

But Maraniss was comforting. "Give up the Pulitzer," he said to her, "and you can have yourself back."

The editors say she continued to deny that "Jimmy" didn't exist, repeated it 15 or 20 times, and then a subtle change crept into her answers.

"I have to believe the story.

"What am I going to do?"

Coleman remained silent. Woodward tried one last time. "If a just God were looking down, what would he say is the truth?"

"I don't know what you mean," Cooke said.

Coleman paced the floor. Maraniss sat at the table across from Cooke.

Woodward proposed a compromise. Would she sign a statement saying she didn't deserve a Pulitzer Prize because she couldn't prove it? Cooke replied that she didn't know why she should say that although she understood it was necessary.

Woodward and Wilkinson left the room, and Coleman soon joined them.

Maraniss sat alone with Cooke. Both were weeping. He held her hand.

"I was afraid I was going to be left alone with you," Cooke said."The first time I saw you today I thought, 'Oh boy, he knows, and I'm going to have to tell him.' I couldn't lie to you. I couldn't tell them. I never would tell Woodward. The more he yelled, the more stubborn I was. Wilkinson represents the corporation. It means so much to Milton. You guys are smart, Woodward for the mind, you for the heart. Why were you smiling?"

"Because," said Maraniss, "I had a tremendous surge of empathy for you, refusing to submit to the institution in an absurd situation. You were so strong not to give in. The institution will survive."

"Oh, David, what am I going to do?" Cooke asked.

They talked for an hour, reviewing their childhoods. Each time another editor opened the conference room door, Maraniss waved him away.

They talked about the horror and the fear she had gone through, especially when she was nominated for a Pulitzer.

She said she was rooting for a series by Neil Henry, a Metro reporter whose articles were considered for a Post Pulitzer nomination in another category.

"I didn't think I had a chance," she said. "There were so many other great stories."

"You can recover and you will," Maraniss told her.

"The only thing I can do is write," Cooke said.

"That's not true," Maraniss replied.

Then he said, "You don't have to say anything to the others, I'll do it for you. What do I tell them?"

"There is no Jimmy and no family," she said. "It was a fabrication. I did so much work on it, but it's a composite. I want to give the prize back."

Woodward and Wilkinson had left the room to discuss the feasibility of putting Cooke on indefinite leave. They called Bradlee, and he decided against it. Bradlee said call off the questioning, it was beginning to sound like a "third degree."

But when Woodward, Wilkinson and Coleman went back into the conference room, Maraniss looked up and announced: "You can go home now, Jimmy is a composite."

Each editor hugged and kissed her.

"I'm sorry I was such a son-of-a-bitch," Woodward said.

"I deserved it," Cooke answered.

"Yes, you did," Woodward said.

Woodward and Wilkinson called Bradlee, and Coleman called Cooke's parents and said he would meet Mrs. Cooke when she flew in the next day.

Cooke had confessed the fraud, and now, emotionally spent, she talked freely with Maraniss. She was embarrassed and humiliated, and didn't want anyone to see her.

She had questions:

"What will happen to me? Will I be able to write again?"

Maraniss told her he would do everything he could to help her, including trying to get her another job, and he promised to stand by her as long as she needed him.

When the conversation drifted to why she had done it, Cooke said she felt she knew enough to bring it off by the time she concocted the story. She had thought about it for two days before writing the original draft she submitted to Coleman.

"I hope," she said, "that Milton doesn't get in trouble over this. He is a good man who cares about his people."

She said she hated Ben Bradlee because he had compared her with Richard Nixon and that she never would have told Woodward.

There were other reasons for her confidence:

1) The cops couldn't find the boy because he didn't exist.

2) She wouldn't be afraid of the city officials.

3) Before the story was published, Simons had said that he wasn't going to ask her the name of the boy or his mother, nor was he going to ask for the street address. (He did direct her to tell Coleman the names, according to others' recollections.) Cooke added, with a smile, that she might have told a psychologist she had called, but the psychologist's calendar had been filled and she couldn't get an appointment.

"You must have been in a panic for a year," Maraniss said, "after you lied on your resume. How did you feel the night you won the Pulitzer?"

"Awful," she said. "I prayed I wouldn't get it, but I never told anybody that."

Maraniss drove her to the Ontario apartments, where she stayed up all night, talking with friends.

At 7 o'clock Wednesday morning, Bradlee broke the news to Graham, who was, as usual, in his office by 6:30. Bradlee invited Graham to his house for breakfast, and they talked about want to do next.

After two hours of sleep at Woodward's house, Maraniss returned to the Ontario, where he and Cooke talked for two hours. Then he called Bradlee, who asked Maraniss to get Cooke's resignation and a written statement.

In longhand, she wrote: "'Jimmy's World' was in essence a fabrication. I never encountered or interviewed an 8-year-old heroin addict. The September 28, 1980, article in The Washington Post was a serious misrepresentation which I deeply regret. I apologize to my newspaper, my profession, the Pulitzer board and all seekers of the truth. Today, in facing up to the truth, I have submitted my resignation. Janet Cooke."

Cooke's mother arrived from Toledo Wednesday, and her father flew to Washington on Friday. While Janet Cooke was being grilled by Washington Post editors, her father had spend the night of April 14 filing out his income tax returns.

"What did I do that went wrong?" Stratman Cooke asked. "I know I was away from home a lot, had to travel a lot. But I couldn't have it both ways . . . . She was extremely ambitious, eager to prove herself. I encouraged that."
THE PRESSURES: Heat and the Achievers Both Have a Tendancy to Rise

There is no question about the pressures and competition in The Washington Post's newsroom. They are powerful. Some people flourish, others get crushed. It is major-league journalism. "Hardball," as Ben Bradlee describes it.

The troubling question is whether pressure on the staff distorts the news published in the paper. There is another question: did pressure to excel, to overreach, drive Janet Cooke to fake a story that won a Pulitzer Prize?

Jonathan Neumann, who doubted the "Jimmy" story from the first time he saw it, believes not.

"It was not pressure that did Janet in," he said. "No pressure can do that. That had to come from within her. She wanted page one."

Page one. The showpiece of the paper. The prestige place to appear. The prize. It is the principal topic of conversation among the assistant managing editors and Bradlee or Simons at the twice-daily story conference.Everybody on the news staff knows that. Every AME looks for stories that he can use to compete for page one space, and every reporter knows that.

The competition to get on page one is so strong that it effects probably cannot be understood even by the top editors. It is one source, if not the central source, of newsroom pressures. To have a story selected for page one is good strokes, an ego trip.

Not many make it. The front page is dominated by national news, mostly about politics, and that is written by the national staff, whose members are generally older and more experienced than those on the Metro staff, or sports, Style and financial staffs. The only regular competitor to national news is foreign news. To get a Metro story on the front page requires an exceptional subject, exceptionally written.

Even some national writers have a problem. Joanne Omang of the national staff says, "Getting on the front page is the route to advancement and favor. The editors fighting for Bradlee's smile get there by having a hot team, and they prod us for stories they can sell for the page. Openly.

"There is little interest in yeoman labor covering a subject that only affects people's lives; what counts in the glory department is page one, and everyone is supposed to 'write it out' onto the front, no matter how mundane the topic. This is part of the creative tension business.

"The sad part is that it often works -- with everyone busting elbows, the paper is full of terrific stories. But the temptation to hype has to be resisted all the time. I often have the feeling when I'm taking an editor off a hyped angle, saying, 'well, no, that's not the story, it didn't happen like that,' that editor is disappointed in me personally, that it's my fault the event isn't page one. This has got to be part of what happened to Janet."

Making the front page is not the only source of pressure. Sandy Rovner of Style puts it this way: "Whatever we do is perceived automatically only in terms of what is seen as our particular self-interest. A lot of us feel intensely loyal to The Post, but management seems not to be able even to see the possibility ot our loyalty."

Lewis Simons of Metro says: "Pressures are so great to produce, to go beyond excellence to the 'holy s---' story. Everyone knows that's what the editors want. The pressure is to get the incredible story, the extraordinary story.

"When you put that up against a fragile and vulnerable personality like Janet's, you produce the worst case."

Bradlee, around whom the newsroom revolves, sees it differently. He believes his system includes great delegation of authority and "encouragement, support, prodding, teasing."

"People want to succeed. They bust their ass to succeed here. There's only a couple of places you want to work in this business, and when you get here you don't blow it. Of course, there's drive by the AME's, because that's the way to get your story to the decision-making process.

"It can result in overselling a story, but a story that looks good at 2:30 may disappear by 6:30. You make 150 decisions on stories every day, and if you start second-guessing them you'll never get the paper out.

"It means you have to have intelligent people you can trust tell you about the best they have to offer and you have to make up your mind.

"The AMEs are very strong. We demand from them.We trust them. We back them. And we don't spend time second-guessing them.

"There is no system to protect you from a pathological liar, and if you constructed it that way you'd never make a deadline."

On the evening of April 6, two days after Cooke's story fell apart, about 30 to 35 members of the Metro staff attended an informal staff meeting at Bob Woodward's home. Others were invited but couldn't make it.

The talk was about two subjects: pressure and "Jimmy's World." Woodward and Milton Coleman went through Cooke story chronologically. Those who had doubted the story had their say.

When the discussion turned to management and pressure, some reporters said they felt strongly that the "system" at The Post has editors making demands on reporters that cannot be met. That reporters are made to feel they are failures when they cannot meet those demands. That there seems to be insufficient guidance and comfort for new reporters. And that the system seems to pit reporters against each other. All this, some reporters felt, helped bring about the "Jimmy" story.

Blaine Harden, a former Metro reporter now with The Washington Post Magazine, urges more attention to younger reporters. "Reporters who come to The Post are usually over-achievers from other newspapers, where their identity and sense ot value was intimately tied to their notoriety and success as a writer. Upon taking a job at The Post, however, reporters are stripped of their identity and forced to re-create themselves for a new set of editors and readers. In this painful growth period, new reporters have little to emulate except the big-splash success of a very few colleagues . . . .

"Serious, conscientous, committed reporters should be loudly praised by editors, given raises, given prestige assignments. This happens now, of course. Yet every reporter who's been at The Post for a while knows, for instance, that flashy writing about quirky suburban housewives grab a lot more attention from editors than does highly informed, analytical coverage of county government."

Out of the crosscurrents of complaint, suggestion, concern and disgrace, what changess are likely? It's too soon to make final judgments.

Donald Graham says, "Everybody is going to have to ask questions of himself. This fraudulent story is very serious business, but it doesn't cast in doubt the basic values of the paper. They remain unchanged.

"As our editorial said Thursday, it's sort of like an embezzlement from a bank:

"We will never arrive at a point when mistakes don't happen, but our basic reliability is tested every day.

"We can't deny the obvious. We printed a false story. We ought to ask ourselves what changes to make and make those changes.The process is complex, and will take some time.

"We do take what's happened very seriously, but no fair-minded person could conclude that the integrity of any other story is called into question.

"We're looking at the process, but not at our basic job in this complicated world and this complicated city."

Bradlee says, "We've got to be sure that our trust in reporters is not betrayed again and in five days, I'm not sure how to do that. She was a one-in-a-million liar."
THE CONCLUSIONS: Once Again, a Fail-Safe System Proves the Exception

So why did it all happen? And how? Milton Coleman and Bob Woodard try to take the blame, and well they should. They had primary responsibility. But to place all the burden on them is a huge mistake. There's enough blame to go around.

Ben Bradlee, the executive director, was wrong, and Howard Simons, the managing editor, was wrong. Beginning, of course, with Janet Cooke, everybody who touched this journalistic felony -- or who should have touched it and didn't -- was wrong. It was a complete systems failure, and there's no excuse for it. These are brilliant people. The Post newsroom runs over with high-caliber talent and skills that weren't employed.

Other thoughts:

1)The system failed because it wasn't used, not because it is faulty. Bradlee and Simons should have asked tough questions, so should Woodward and Coleman and others. And every staffer who had a serious doubt about "Jimmy" had an unavoidable responsibility to pursue it, hard.

2)This business of trusting reporters absolutely goes too far. Clearly it did in this case.There is a point when total reliance on this kind of trust allows the editor to duck his own responsibility. Editors have to insist on knowing and verifying. That's one of the big reasons they hold their jobs.

3)There's a mythology hanging in the air or the newsroom. Sometimes it acts like a disease. Young reporters come onto the staff expecting to find another Watergate under every third rock they kick over. That is naive. Blockbusters are not everyday occurrences. Editors are somewhat infected too, but not to the degree that some of the reporters say they believe. Editors have to get all there is in a news story.

4)The Post did not invent Janet Cooke. That is a ridiculous idea. Given its competitive nature, it may very well have unwittingly encouraged her success and thereby hastened her failure. Here was an aberration that grew in fertile ground, according to one reporter. That's close to the mark.

5)While editors repeatedly talked about their trust in reporters, the trust apparently only applies to written stories, not to reporters' opinions. Otherwise, somebody with authority would have learned something about those persistent doubts on the Cooke story and would have investigated.

6)The front page syndrome is a problem, and it may be insoluble. Page one is the prestige position in the paper, and until the stories it is to carry have been selected, the rest of the paper can't take shape. And Bradlee is right. The paper has to get out, on schedule, every day. Some of the pressures reporters talk about come with the news business.

7)No reporter or other staff member should be employed without a thorough check of his or her credentials.

8)The scramble for journalistic prizes is poisonous. The obligation is to inform readers, not to collect frameable certificates, however prestigious. Maybe The Post should consider not entering contests.

9)News executives have a responsibility to resolve personnel hassles quickly. Among the what-ifs: had Coleman and Vivian Aplin-Brownlee been on better terms, he might have asked her to look over the Cooke story before it ran, and she, given her instant disbelief of the story, might have challenged it effectively. And that Coleman-Maraniss disagreement should have been attended to promptly.

10)Young reporters are impatient. Even the best of them, among whose ranks Janet Cooke appeared to be, profit by seasoning. To push them too fast is a high-risk undertaking.

11)Did race have anything to do with Cooke's ascendancy? Did she get choice assignments and move up because she was handsome and black? Was she employed for the same reason?

There's some yes and some I-don't-know in any honest answer. If there's an employer who says he wouldn't have hired her, he hasn't seen Cooke either in person or at work. There are white editors on this paper who want to report news on the black community but who know they can't get at some of it in the same way blacks can.

Milton Coleman, as good as guy as any at The Post and Cooke's last editor, is black. So are two of her strongest critics, Vivian Aplin-Brownlee, who was her first editor, and Courtland Milloy, who was among the first and most persistent doubters.

Race may have played some role, but professional pride and human decency were deeply involved in this story and that has not a diddle to do with race.

12)To believe that this mistake, big as it was, challenges the honesty of any other story in The Post or any other newspaper, is overreaching. It won't wash. There is no evidence whatsoever that this kind of thing is tolerated at this paper. To over-reach the other way, if this experience tightens discipline in the news process, it may have done some good.

13)When confidentiality is granted to a news source, by a reporter, that promise cannot commit the supervising editor. If the reporter can't support the integrity of his or her story by revealing the name to his or her editor, the story shouldn't be published. And if that safeguard prevents some news stories from appearing, so be it.

14)To give the impression that The Post is staffed by disgruntled people is nonsense. For every reporter or editor with a complaint, however legitimate, there is at least one other who is on a personal high because he or she works for the newspaper. Staff loyalty to The Post is so powerful that it borders on the absurd.

15)The Post is one of the very few great enterprises in journalism, and everybody associated with it ought to be proud of it.

GRAPHIC: Picture 1, Vivian Aplin-Brownlee; Picture 2, Benjamin C. Bradlee; Picture 3, Milton Coleman; Picture 4, Janet Cooke; Picture 5, Donald Graham; Picture 6, David Maraniss; Picture 7, Courtland Milloy; Picture 8, Howard Simons; Picture 9, Robert U. (Bob) Woodward

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After reading "Jimmy's World," the handout, please print out the following two articles. Please be prepared to discuss them in class on Thursday. The first of the two articles was printed a few days after Cooke was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, journalism's highest award. The second article was written by Bill Green, the Washington Post's ombudsman.

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John Dos Passos: John Dos Passos, American writer, one of the major novelists of the post-World War I "lost generation," whose reputation as a social historian and as a radical critic of the quality of American life rests primarily on his trilogy U.S.A.

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Table of Contents

What is Mark Twain's real name?

Where did Mark Twain grow up?

When did Mark Twain start writing?

What are some of Mark Twain's most famous works?

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Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (born November 30, 1835, Florida, Missouri, U.S.-died April 21, 1910, Redding, Connecticut), American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). A gifted raconteur, distinctive humorist, and irascible moralist, he transcended the apparent limitations of his origins to become a popular public figure and one of America's best and most beloved writers.

Youth

Samuel Clemens, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens, was born two months prematurely and was in relatively poor health for the first 10 years of his life. His mother tried various allopathic and hydropathic remedies on him during those early years, and his recollections of those instances (along with other memories of his growing up) would eventually find their way into Tom Sawyer and other writings. Because he was sickly, Clemens was often coddled, particularly by his mother, and he developed early the tendency to test her indulgence through mischief, offering only his good nature as bond for the domestic crimes he was apt to commit. When Jane Clemens was in her 80s, Clemens asked her about his poor health in those early years: "I suppose that during that whole time you were uneasy about me?" "Yes, the whole time," she answered. "Afraid I wouldn't live?" "No," she said, "afraid you would."

Insofar as Clemens could be said to have inherited his sense of humour, it would have come from his mother, not his father. John Clemens, by all reports, was a serious man who seldom demonstrated affection. No doubt his temperament was affected by his worries over his financial situation, made all the more distressing by a series of business failures. It was the diminishing fortunes of the Clemens family that led them in 1839 to move 30 miles (50 km) east from Florida, Missouri, to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal, where there were greater opportunities. John Clemens opened a store and eventually became a justice of the peace, which entitled him to be called "Judge" but not to a great deal more. In the meantime, the debts accumulated. Still, John Clemens believed the Tennessee land he had purchased in the late 1820s (some 70,000 acres [28,000 hectares]) might one day make them wealthy, and this prospect cultivated in the children a dreamy hope. Late in his life, Twain reflected on this promise that became a curse:

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us-dreamers and indolent....It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich-these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Judging from his own speculative ventures in silver mining, business, and publishing, it was a curse that Sam Clemens never quite outgrew.

Perhaps it was the romantic visionary in him that caused Clemens to recall his youth in Hannibal with such fondness. As he remembered it in "Old Times on the Mississippi" (1875), the village was a "white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning," until the arrival of a riverboat suddenly made it a hive of activity. The gamblers, stevedores, and pilots, the boisterous raftsmen and elegant travelers, all bound for somewhere surely glamorous and exciting, would have impressed a young boy and stimulated his already active imagination. And the lives he might imagine for these living people could easily be embroidered by the romantic exploits he read in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and others. Those same adventures could be reenacted with his companions as well, and Clemens and his friends did play at being pirates, Robin Hood, and other fabled adventurers. Among those companions was Tom Blankenship, an affable but impoverished boy whom Twain later identified as the model for the character Huckleberry Finn. There were local diversions as well-fishing, picnicking, and swimming. A boy might swim or canoe to and explore Glasscock's Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River, or he might visit the labyrinthine McDowell's Cave, about 2 miles (3 km) south of town. The first site evidently became Jackson's Island in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; the second became McDougal's Cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the summers, Clemens visited his uncle John Quarles's farm, near Florida, Missouri, where he played with his cousins and listened to stories told by the slave Uncle Daniel, who served, in part, as a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn.

It is not surprising that the pleasant events of youth, filtered through the softening lens of memory, might outweigh disturbing realities. However, in many ways the childhood of Samuel Clemens was a rough one. Death from disease during this time was common. His sister Margaret died of a fever when Clemens was not yet four years old; three years later his brother Benjamin died. When he was eight, a measles epidemic (potentially lethal in those days) was so frightening to him that he deliberately exposed himself to infection by climbing into bed with his friend Will Bowen in order to relieve the anxiety. A cholera epidemic a few years later killed at least 24 people, a substantial number for a small town. In 1847 Clemens's father died of pneumonia. John Clemens's death contributed further to the family's financial instability. Even before that year, however, continuing debts had forced them to auction off property, to sell their only slave, Jennie, to take in boarders, even to sell their furniture.

Apart from family worries, the social environment was hardly idyllic. Missouri was a slave state, and, though the young Clemens had been reassured that chattel slavery was an institution approved by God, he nevertheless carried with him memories of cruelty and sadness that he would reflect upon in his maturity. Then there was the violence of Hannibal itself. One evening in 1844 Clemens discovered a corpse in his father's office; it was the body of a California emigrant who had been stabbed in a quarrel and was placed there for the inquest. In January 1845 Clemens watched a man die in the street after he had been shot by a local merchant; this incident provided the basis for the Boggs shooting in Huckleberry Finn. Two years later he witnessed the drowning of one of his friends, and only a few days later, when he and some friends were fishing on Sny Island, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, they discovered the drowned and mutilated body of a fugitive slave. As it turned out, Tom Blankenship's older brother Bence had been secretly taking food to the runaway slave for some weeks before the slave was apparently discovered and killed. Bence's act of courage and kindness served in some measure as a model for Huck's decision to help the fugitive Jim in Huckleberry Finn.

After the death of his father, Sam Clemens worked at several odd jobs in town, and in 1848 he became a printer's apprentice for Joseph P. Ament's Missouri Courier. He lived sparingly in the Ament household but was allowed to continue his schooling and, from time to time, indulge in boyish amusements. Nevertheless, by the time Clemens was 13, his boyhood had effectively come to an end.

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Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (born November 30, 1835, Florida, Missouri, U.S.-died April 21, 1910, Redding, Connecticut), American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).

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Ernest Hemingway, in full Ernest Miller Hemingway, (born July 21, 1899, Cicero [now in Oak Park], Illinois, U.S.-died July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho), American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life. His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and British fiction in the 20th century.

The first son of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago. He was educated in the public schools and began to write in high school, where he was active and outstanding, but the parts of his boyhood that mattered most were summers spent with his family on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan. On graduation from high school in 1917, impatient for a less-sheltered environment, he did not enter college but went to Kansas City, where he was employed as a reporter for the Star. He was repeatedly rejected for military service because of a defective eye, but he managed to enter World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. On July 8, 1918, not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the Austro-Italian front at Fossalta di Piave. Decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry him. These were experiences he was never to forget.

After recuperating at home, Hemingway renewed his efforts at writing, for a while worked at odd jobs in Chicago, and sailed for France as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Advised and encouraged by other American writers in Paris- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound-he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print there, and in 1925 his first important book, a collection of stories called In Our Time, was published in New York City; it was originally released in Paris in 1924.

In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises, a novel with which he scored his first solid success. A pessimistic but sparkling book, it deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France and Spain-members of the postwar Lost Generation, a phrase that Hemingway scorned while making it famous. This work also introduced him to the limelight, which he both craved and resented for the rest of his life. Hemingway's The Torrents of Spring, a parody of the American writer Sherwood Anderson's book Dark Laughter, also appeared in 1926.

The writing of books occupied Hemingway for most of the postwar years. He remained based in Paris, but he traveled widely for the skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background for much of his writing. His position as a master of short fiction had been advanced by Men Without Women in 1927 and thoroughly established with the stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933. Among his finest stories are "The Killers," "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." At least in the public view, however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such works. Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power, fusing love story with war story. While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World War I, the American lieutenant Frederic Henry falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends him during his recuperation after being wounded. She becomes pregnant by him, but he must return to his post. Henry deserts during the Italians' disastrous retreat after the Battle of Caporetto, and the reunited couple flee Italy by crossing the border into Switzerland. There, however, Catherine and her baby die during childbirth, and Henry is left desolate at the loss of the great love of his life.

Hemingway's love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more as tragic ceremony than as sport. Similarly, a safari he took in 1933-34 in the big-game region of Tanganyika resulted in Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big-game hunting. Mostly for the fishing, he purchased a house in Key West, Florida, and bought his own fishing boat. A minor novel of 1937 called To Have and Have Not is about a Caribbean desperado and is set against a background of lower-class violence and upper-class decadence in Key West during the Great Depression.

By now Spain was in the midst of civil war. Still deeply attached to that country, Hemingway made four trips there, once more a correspondent. He raised money for the Republicans in their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco, and he wrote a play called The Fifth Column (1938), which is set in besieged Madrid. As in many of his books, the protagonist of the play is based on the author. Following his last visit to the Spanish war, he purchased Finca Vigía ("Lookout Farm"), an unpretentious estate outside Havana, Cuba, and went to cover another war-the Japanese invasion of China.

The harvest of Hemingway's considerable experience of Spain in war and peace was the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a substantial and impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel, in preference to A Farewell to Arms. It was also the most successful of all his books as measured in sales. Set during the Spanish Civil War, it tells of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join a guerrilla band behind the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. Most of the novel concerns Jordan's relations with the varied personalities of the band, including the girl Maria, with whom he falls in love. Through dialogue, flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling and vivid profiles of the Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity stirred up by the civil war. Jordan's mission is to blow up a strategic bridge near Segovia in order to aid a coming Republican attack, which he realizes is doomed to fail. In an atmosphere of impending disaster, he blows up the bridge but is wounded and makes his retreating comrades leave him behind, where he prepares a last-minute resistance to his Nationalist pursuers.

All of his life Hemingway was fascinated by war-in A Farewell to Arms he focused on its pointlessness, in For Whom the Bell Tolls on the comradeship it creates-and, as World War II progressed, he made his way to London as a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air Force and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day (June 6, 1944). Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, he saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. He also participated in the liberation of Paris, and, although ostensibly a journalist, he impressed professional soldiers not only as a man of courage in battle but also as a real expert in military matters, guerrilla activities, and intelligence collection.

Following the war in Europe, Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and began to work seriously again. He also traveled widely, and, on a trip to Africa, he was injured in a plane crash. Soon after (in 1953), he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short heroic novel about an old Cuban fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home. This book, which played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, was as enthusiastically praised as his previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), the story of a professional army officer who dies while on leave in Venice, had been damned.

By 1960 Hemingway had left Cuba and settled in Ketchum, Idaho. (He expressed his belief in what he called the "historical necessity" of the Cuban Revolution; his attitude toward its leader, Fidel Castro, who had taken power in 1959, varied.) He tried to lead his life and do his work as before. For a while he succeeded, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he was twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he received electroshock treatments. Two days after his return to the house in Ketchum, he took his life with a shotgun. Hemingway had been married four times: to Hadley Richardson in 1921 (divorced 1927), Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927 (divorced 1940), Martha Gellhorn in 1940 (divorced 1945), and Mary Welsh in 1946. He had fathered three sons: John Hadley Nicanor ("Bumby"), with Hadley, born in 1923; Patrick, with Pauline, in 1928; and Gregory, also with Pauline, in 1931.

Hemingway left behind a substantial amount of manuscript, some of which has been published. A Moveable Feast, an entertaining memoir of his years in Paris (1921-26) before he was famous, was issued in 1964. Islands in the Stream, three closely related novellas growing directly out of his peacetime memories of the Caribbean island of Bimini, of Havana during World War II, and of searching for U-boats off Cuba, appeared in 1970.

Hemingway's characters plainly embody his own values and view of life. The main characters of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with honour, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as "the Hemingway code." To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show "grace under pressure" and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme clearly established in The Old Man and the Sea.

Hemingway's prose style was probably the most widely imitated of any in the 20th century. He wished to strip his own use of language of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of verbosity, embellishment, and sentimentality. In striving to be as objective and honest as possible, Hemingway hit upon the device of describing a series of actions by using short, simple sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric has been eliminated. These sentences are composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their effect. The resulting terse, concentrated prose is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant and capable of conveying great irony through understatement. Hemingway's use of dialogue was similarly fresh, simple, and natural-sounding. The influence of this style was felt worldwide wherever novels were written, particularly from the 1930s through the '50s.

A consummately contradictory man, Hemingway achieved a fame surpassed by few, if any, American authors of the 20th century. The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to re-create the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game hunting, and bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy. He was a celebrity long before he reached middle age, but his popularity continues to be validated by serious critical opinion.

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Ernest Hemingway | Biography, Books, Death, & Facts

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Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life. His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and British fiction.

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Quick Biography of Benjamin Franklin: Benjamin Franklin, a printer by trade, a scientist by fame, and a man of action by all accounts, continues to shape American thinking and action

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Upton Sinclair, Author, Dead; Crusader for Social Justice, 90

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In the early thirties, Mr. Sinclair was converted to a belief in psychic phenomena and wrote a book about them, "Mental Radio," that he felt important enough to reprint in 1962. At the same time he wrote "The Wet Parade," an impassioned plea for Prohibition.

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Janet Cooke

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Janet Cooke entered the acre-square newsroom of The Washington Post wearing a red wool suit and a white silk shirt. It was her first day of work. She was two hours late. She'd gotten lost walking the three blocks from her hotel.

It was the third day of 1980, the beginning of a new chapter for this 25-year-old black woman whose upper-middle class parents had sent their daughters to the finest white prep schools but insisted upon living close to their roots in Toledo. As Cooke made her way down the long aisle through the desk pods of the Metro Section, heads turned. Editors and reporters noted the shortness of her pleated skirt, the apparent self-possession of her gait, the length of her acrylic fingernails. In this post-Watergate era of big stories, star reporters, and "creative tension," most members of the Metro staff were young and well-pedigreed, true believers in the power of the fourth estate, captained by history's own Bob Woodward, who was trying his hand for the first time as an assistant managing editor. Deep inside the Beltway, in the heart of the nation's political culture, the Post 's was a newsroom like all others-and like no other, a distinct creature of the city it covered, rife with intrigue and machination. The customary greeting among its 900 staffers, working just blocks from the White House: "What's the gossip?"

At the moment, clearly, it was Janet Cooke.

Six months earlier her résumé had crossed Ben Bradlee's desk. The legendary executive editor-known for his silver hair and salty language, his friendship with JFK, and his willingness to stand behind aggressive reporting-had taken up a red grease pencil and circled "Phi Beta Kappa," "Vassar," and "Black Journalists Association." At a time when the newspaper business was just beginning a journey toward workplace diversity, here was a twofer, a highly talented black woman with an impressive résumé. Bradlee passed Cooke's information to Woodward, with the message that the young Toledo Blade reporter should be recruited before The New York Times or the networks scooped her up.

On September 28, 1980, nearly nine months and 52 bylines after her first day at the Post, "Jimmy's World" was published on the front page. Cooke's story, about an 8-year-old heroin addict, created an instant sensation-the 1980s equivalent of "going viral"-reprinted around the country and around the world. As DC Mayor Marion Barry and city health and police officials hustled to find the child and prosecute his guardian-tormentors, the Post stood fast behind its First Amendment right to protect its reporter from having to reveal the boy's whereabouts. For this, the paper was heavily criticized, especially by black residents in the then-majority African-American city. Where journalists saw a blockbuster story, with bright writing and a deep social impact, civilians saw a child in need, and activists saw a captivating example of the black man's burden. Jimmy was never found.

On April 13, 1981, Cooke was awarded a Pulitzer. She won after the well-intentioned Pulitzer committee, enthusiastic about both Cooke's story and the possibility of awarding the first Pulitzer in journalism ever to an African-American woman, juggled her entry from the local-news category to the feature-writing category in order to assure her a prize.

"Cooke was a warning shot. It was a harbinger of all kinds of journalistic scandals to come."

Proud of its former employee, the Toledo Blade quickly prepared a story. It went to press at 8am. Later that morning, according to an exhaustive investigation by Post ombudsman Bill Green, Blade editors read biographical sketches of the Pulitzer winners that moved over the Associated Press wire. The sketches were based on the résumés submitted with the entries. The Blade's bio for Janet, taken from its own personnel records, differed considerably. On her Pulitzer résumé, according to Post accounts, Cooke claimed to have graduated magna cum laude from Vassar College and to have received a master's degree from the University of Toledo. From what the Blade knew, she'd attended Vassar only for her freshman year and received a bachelor of arts from the University of Toledo. Blade editors alerted the wire service.

Sometime after 3 in the afternoon, Bradlee and Managing Editor Howard Simons received simultaneous phone calls. An AP editor wanted Simons. The assistant to the president of Vassar wanted Bradlee. Both callers were asking about Janet's résumé.

"Take her to the woodshed," Bradlee ordered, according to Green.

For nearly 11 hours-in various offices and conference rooms at the Post, in the Capitol Hilton bar, and even in City Editor Milton Coleman's car as the two drove around Southeast DC looking for Jimmy's house-Janet was alternately interrogated, cajoled, comforted, pressured, and flattered by Bradlee, Woodward, Simons, Coleman, and others.

Finally, at 1:45am, Cooke confessed to Woodward's Deputy AME David Maraniss. "There is no Jimmy and no family," she said, according to Maraniss. "It was a fabrication. I want to give the prize back."

Disgraced, the Post returned the Pulitzer. (The prize was re-awarded to Teresa Carpenter of The Village Voice.)

"The paper absolutely changed that moment," says Donald E. Graham, the Post 's publisher at the time, scion of the family that owned and ran the paper for eight decades, until its sale in 2013 to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

And from that moment forward, journalism changed, too. Cooke became infamous, the first in a line of publicly exposed fabulists including Stephen Glass of The New Republic, Jayson Blair of The New York Times, and Jack Kelley of USA Today.

Cooke's transgressions rocked the foundations of trust the press had built since the post-World War II blossoming of the information age. After centuries of Fleet Streeters, muckrakers, and yellow journalists, the public had welcomed Walter Cronkite into their living rooms; the crusading work of journalists had freed America from a bad war and a crooked presidency. All over the country, reporters were busy ferreting out corruption of all kinds. Now, suddenly, with Cooke, the press had fallen from grace.

Cooke's case also came to symbolize myriad other issues and transgressions in both journalism and the world at large, including the use of unnamed sources, minority recruitment, newsroom ethics, résumé fraud, and the tendency of some writers, operating in the genre known as creative nonfiction, to take license in the pursuit of more literary work.

"The Janet Cooke fabrication was shocking because it came at a time when most people respected newspapers and respected what we now call the media," says Howard Kurtz, a media critic and former Post staffer.

"Cooke was a warning shot," Kurtz says. "It was a harbinger of all kinds of journalistic scandals to come."

In the interest of disclosure, I know Janet Cooke.

The day she first appeared in the Post newsroom, I was 23, a former copy boy two years into a reporting job on the Metro staff.

Back then, the Metro staff was considered a training ground. In a newsroom stocked with legends like Bradlee and Woodward, we were known as "the kids," even though most of us were in our late 20s and 30s. I was a bit on the young side; most of the other staffers had been interns out of the Ivy Leagues or star writers at other papers before coming to Metro. Also in the mix were a dozen or so women and minorities hired into two-year internships, a pipeline to newsroom diversity.

It was a heady time in the newspaper business, a golden age when the news budget was flush and the media carried a sheen of importance and invincibility. The Post 's own Woodward and Carl Bernstein had inspired a crowded field of young reporters to join the business in the interest of wearing the white hat of the public's right to know.

We were a tight-knit group, competitors and comrades both. We played co-ed touch football on Sundays on a field just north of the Washington Monument. (Even Woodward played on occasion. Maureen Dowd, then at The Washington Star, had nice speed and a good pair of hands.) We partied together at Woodward's Georgetown manse, at Maraniss's suburban house, at various bars all over town.

But most of all, we worked. Everyone had dark circles under their eyes, everyone was always rushing around, stumbling over themselves to find what our absolute leader, Bradlee, liked to call a "Holy Shit" story. We wanted the brass ring-assignment to a special project that would showcase our talents and win an award; promotion to the National or Foreign or Style staff; a book or movie contract. Given our boss and role model, anything seemed possible.

At the same time, we were true believers in the standards set by Woodward and Bradlee. There was a star system, yes. There was creative tension, yes. But at the same time, we knew that shortcuts and screw ups or questionable information would not be tolerated. The idea of fabricating a quote, much less a character or an entire story, was unimaginable-akin to sinning in church.

In a letter confirming that her Prize-winning story was "in essence a fabrication," Cooke also submitted her resignation. (Note: Cooke incorrectly cited September 28, 1981, as her story's publication date. The correct date is September 28, 1980.)

Into this swirl came Janet Cooke, fresh from her hometown Toledo Blade. I met her late one night at her desk in the Weekly section, to which she'd been assigned. A zoned supplement to the paper, it was known as a training ground for affirmative-action hires and a dumping ground for older relics on their way to retirement. To the black members of the Post staff, the Weeklies were known as the Ghetto.

By the end of February, Cooke and I had begun dating. While we lasted officially only until June, our relationship continued in fits and starts for another year-a painful, exhilarating, 20-something psychodrama, during which time the Jimmy story was produced.

After the Pulitzer was returned, I was suspected of collaborating with Cooke on "Jimmy's World," my name having been found on the "edit trail" of the Post 's computer system. From the beginning, part of our relationship involved my services as an informal reader, not unusual among colleagues in any newsroom. Several times I made suggestions on "Jimmy's World" for style and flow; countless other times I read drafts for suggestions and support.

The truth is, I had my suspicions about the story from the beginning, but I couldn't bring myself to flat-out ask Janet if Jimmy was real. I'm not sure I wanted to know. To some extent, I suspected myself of being jealous-the piece had award-winner written all over it. In my favor was the fact that, months before the Pulitzer announcement, I voiced my concerns about the article to two older and respected reporters, Patrick Tyler and Joe Pichirallo, who formed one of Woodward's pet investigative teams. After the Pulitzer was returned, Woodward grilled me twice over two days. Had I something to confess, I surely would have.

In 1996, following Janet's return to the states after living in France for more than a decade, she decided to tell her story. She spoke to me at length for a piece published in GQ, entitled "Janet's World," the only substantial interview Cooke ever gave. The story details Cooke's difficult upbringing and her lifelong use of lies as a coping mechanism, primarily against the exceptionally high expectations and inflexible rules of her parents, her father particularly. It also documents her difficulties navigating the racial politics of the day-by some accounts, "Jimmy's World" would never have happened if not for the good intentions of those who thought their role was to level the playing field for minorities.

Thirty-five years since the Pulitzer was awarded and returned, interest in Cooke and her story-a cautionary tale at once so singular and so universal-has not waned.

Nearly every semester I get calls from reporters, producers, and journalism students seeking to track down Cooke for an interview. Most journalism schools offer some form of ethics course as part of their curriculum. I suspect all of them mention Cooke somewhere in the syllabus.

The influence of Cooke's transgressions runs through the corpus of modern journalism like blood through the circulatory system, leaving no area untouched. Racial and sexual diversity in the newsroom. The use of unnamed sources. The responsibility of editors to question reporters' stories-should all writers be considered guilty until proven accurate? The responsibility of writers to fact-check their own stories. The pressures of working on deadline and being judged by one's output. The perils of literary journalism. And the perils of human frailty-what responsibility does an institution have to look beyond a person's résumé and into his or her psyche?

"What caused Janet to do what she did was personal," says Walt Harrington, a former longtime Post staffer and editor and a colleague of Cooke's who went on to teach journalism at the University of Illinois. "As it happened, the organization pushed a flawed person into [something she couldn't handle]. It's like taking a person who's weak and encouraging them to do something that they're not equipped to resist. But at the same time, any system should be thoughtful about that kind of person."

I am nominally in touch with Cooke via email. I don't think I will betray her trust by reporting that she is living within the borders of the continental United States, within a family setting, and pursuing a career that does not primarily involve writing.

While I faithfully forward all requests for interviews, Cooke consistently declines to speak further of her role in the Pulitzer scandal. Clearly it has taken a toll.

"What more is there for anyone to write?" she said in response to my email about this story. And then she added, in her typical droll fashion, "Essentially, I've spent the last 30 years waiting to die."

Knowing her as I do, she was only half kidding.

Beyond Cooke's personal story-of an ambitious and talented but flawed young woman who dreamed of covering the White House-is the larger one, the unintended effect of her transgressions. Not only did she fabricate; she won the Pulitzer. Not only did she lie; she did so in the grandest fashion, on the biggest stage, and in the process disgraced her employers, pulling the wool over some of the brightest eyes in the business.

And if someone could do that right under the noses of Bradlee and Woodward and company, how could any reporter ever be trusted again?

Beautifully written and well-researched, "Jimmy's World" was a perfect storm of a story-a compelling combination of writer and subject matter and the politics of the day. It described an 8-year-old on heroin and the drug trade around him. The story ran about 2,100 words, starting on the front page, a little long for a standard newspaper feature but short compared to investigative projects that were in vogue. The article included Cooke's reporting about the city's burgeoning heroin trade, the emergence of the Golden Crescent in Asia as a major producer, and the impact of drugs on the community, years before the crack epidemic made this a common theme.

At the heart of the piece was a fourth-grader who lived in a heroin "shooting gallery" with his mother and her boyfriend, a drug dealer named Ron. "And every day, Ron or someone else fires up Jimmy, plunging a needle into his bony arm, sending the fourth-grader into a hypnotic nod," Cooke wrote.

The piece comes to a chilling end with Jimmy receiving his heroin fix as the reporter watches. "The needle slides into the boy's soft skin like a straw pushed into the center of a freshly baked cake. . . . 'Pretty soon, man,' Ron says, 'you got to learn how to do this for yourself.' "

For the Post, the Cooke debacle "was a tremendous jolt to the whole place," says former publisher Graham. "We, the Post collectively, didn't at first know how to respond. It seemed to me at the time that the best answer was first and foremost changing the way we hired people so that we were much more careful about reviewing what they said in their résumé."

All over the country, reporters were busy ferreting out corruption of all kinds. Now, suddenly, with Cooke, the press had fallen from grace.

For the late Ben Bradlee, says his biographer, Jeff Himmelman, "there was some real anguish about it. He felt like he had let the Grahams down, who had shown so much faith in him through Watergate. It was their paper and he didn't catch this, and he knew he didn't catch it, and there were a lot of other people who should have caught it, too, but it was his name at the top. . . . By far this was the big black eye of his career."

In a larger way, Graham says delicately, after the Cooke affair, something very fundamental began to shift in the Post 's and other newsrooms. Previously, there was "a tendency to trust your reporters," Graham says.

The audacity of Cooke's fabrication broke this bond of trust, both with editors and with readers. Suddenly, the institution known for bringing down liars and shining light on injustice was itself revealed to be a transgressor against the truth. As a reporter at the time, at the Post or anywhere else, you could feel the door slam. Before Cooke, we journalists wore the capes of crusaders who could do no wrong.

Today we face a different public perception. The line from Watergate, in 1972, to Cooke in 1980, to the vehicular death of the UK's Princess Diana in 1997-for which journalists were blamed-stretches a mere 25 years. Today, in the minds of many, the word "journalist" connotes invasive tabloid headlines and paparazzi.

Probably the biggest change wrought by the Cooke affair was the way reporters were allowed to use and manage unnamed sources. Prior to Cooke, reporters were trusted, the way Woodward was with Deep Throat-nobody asked for his identity. In the months following the Cooke affair, however, that practice began to change, recalls Jim Romenesko, a longtime observer of journalism. In the years to come, Romenesko posted on his site a number of memos from newspapers, including USA Today, declaring a new policy in which reporters were required to share the identities of unnamed sources with an editor. This practice remains an industry standard.

In a larger sense, there was a fundamental change in newsrooms. Before Cooke, newsrooms were more like the movies, peopled by a collection of committed, rogue oddballs. Since then, journalism has become more homogenized and standardized, more corporate, more rule-driven, though this has been due in part to economics. In sum: After Cooke, it was still cool to be a reporter, but it was also a little tainted. One of us had flown too close to the sun. All had been burned.

"What more is there for anyone to write?" she said in response to my email about this story. And then she added, in her typical droll fashion, "Essentially, I've spent the last 30 years waiting to die." Knowing her as I do, she was only half kidding.

Harrington also points out that after Cooke, newspapers worked harder to be open with readers. For investigative series, literary recreations, or controversial stories, more column inches were devoted to source citations and explanatory editors' notes.

Another result, says Romenesko, was the rise of the era of the ombudsman at newspapers. The Post's own Bill Green, with his evenhanded account of the Post 's failings in the Cooke affair, helped spark the trend. With the dual missions of advocating for the community of readers and functioning as a newspaper's internal moral compass, ombudsmen served to ease the trust issues that the Cooke affair literally and symbolically raised with the public. Even without ombudsmen, newspapers today put an ever greater emphasis on community relations, some of which can be traced to the post-Cooke efforts to quell community outrage.

For African-American journalists, say some, there was yet another layer of damage done. In a way, elements of Cooke's story are similar to the stories of many others. There is no better way to say it: Efforts at leveling the playing field are appreciated by those served. But the navigation is both tricky and somewhat embarrassing for the beneficiaries, many of whom are highly accomplished-if not, they wouldn't have come to anyone's attention in the first place.

"For all the glamour and prestige that Janet supposedly brought in with her to the Post, they put her straight into the Ghetto," says Courtland Milloy, a columnist for the Post and the only pre-Cooke-era staffer still working at the paper. "With all her credentials, Janet still went straight to the Weekly. That was just very telling to me."

"What happened with Cooke was a disappointment to African-American journalists," says Julianne Malveaux, a political commentator and past president of Bennett College, a historically black liberal arts college for women. "It was a hit. We all took it on the chin.

"People were excited when she got a Pulitzer and then [when it was returned], people were like, someone had pulled a rug out from under you," Malveaux says. "It basically eroded the integrity of a cadre of African-American journalists who do street reporting. It made people look at people of color, and African Americans in particular, with more scrutiny. Janet Cooke gave white folks permission to be skeptical about black people in the newsroom."

Malveaux notes the perception that "anytime an African American screws up, especially in the area of integrity, it essentially slimes all African Americans. When a white guy screws up, like Stephen Glass, it doesn't slime on white people. They just say, okay, he was a jerk, and people move on."

For this reason, Malveaux says, she tries to remember that there was a troubled black woman at the center of the storm.

"In the end, I'm still concerned for Cooke. She made a major journalistic mistake, but she's a human being and deserves to be seen through that prism. She had great writing chops but she used them the wrong way."

Regardless of Cooke's personal story or actual intentions, her transgressions signaled the beginning of a radical change in the role of the media in American life. We live now in an age when no one fully trusts the media.

"One reason we're even still talking about what happened in 1981," Kurtz says, "is because Janet Cooke was to the news business what Vietnam and Watergate were to political establishments."

Cooke returning the Pulitzer, he adds, "was the moment that public trust gave way to cynicism. . . . Each subsequent episode tarnishes us all."

JIMMY'S WORLD

by Janet Cooke

September 28, 1980

Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms.

He nestles in a large, beige reclining chair in the living room of his comfortably furnished home in Southeast Washington. There is an almost cherubic expression on his small, round face as he talks about life-clothes, money, the Baltimore Orioles and heroin. He has been an addict since the age of 5.

His hands are clasped behind his head, fancy running shoes adorn his feet, and a striped Izod T-shirt hangs over his thin frame. "Bad, ain't it," he boasts to a reporter visiting recently. "I got me six of these."

Jimmy's is a world of hard drugs, fast money and the good life he believes both can bring. Every day, junkies casually buy heroin from Ron, his mother's live-in-lover, in the dining room of Jimmy's home. They "cook" it in the kitchen and "fire up" in the bedrooms. And every day, Ron or someone else fires up Jimmy, plunging a needle into his bony arm, sending the fourth grader into a hypnotic nod.

Jimmy prefers this atmosphere to school, where only one subject seems relevant to fulfilling his dreams. "I want to have me a bad car and dress good and also have me a good place to live," he says. "So, I pretty much pay attention to math because I know I got to keep up when I finally get me something to sell."

Jimmy wants to sell drugs, maybe even on the District's meanest street, Condon Terrace SE, and some day deal heroin, he says, "just like my man Ron."

Ron, 27, and recently up from the South, was the one who first turned Jimmy on."He'd be buggin' me all the time about what the shots were and what people was doin' and one day he said, 'When can I get off?'" Ron says, leaning against a wall in a narcotic haze, his eyes half closed, yet piercing. "I said, 'Well, s-, you can have some now.' I let him snort a little and, damn, the little dude really did get off."

Six months later, Jimmy was hooked. "I felt like I was part of what was goin' down," he says. "I can't really tell you how it feel. You never done any? Sort of like them rides at King's Dominion . . . like if you was to go on all of them in one day.

"It be real different from herb (marijuana). That's baby s-. Don't nobody here hardly ever smoke no herb. You can't hardly get none right now anyway."

Jimmy's mother Andrea accepts her son's habit as a fact of life, although she will not inject the child herself and does not like to see others do it.

"I don't really like to see him fire up," she says. "But, you know, I think he would have got into it one day, anyway. Everybody does. When you live in the ghetto, it's all a matter of survival. If he wants to get away from it when he's older, then that's his thing. But right now, things are better for us than they've ever been. . . . Drugs and black folk been together for a very long time."

Mike Sager was working the night shift as a cops reporter when Janet Cooke was hired at The Washington Post. He would wander the newsroom waiting for a suitable crime to occur and Cooke would often stay late struggling with a particular story. Before long, Sager was invited to sit down at Cooke's keyboard to offer some writing advice. Thus began Sager's romance with a young woman who would spark the most tumultuous event in Pulitzer history. Cooke was desperate to escape the second-tier Weekly staff and thought her path off might be a story she was working on about a new type of heroin roiling the city. One outreach worker told Cooke that an 8-year-old boy was being treated, jolting Cooke into a desperate hunt for him. The search went on for weeks as Cooke grew frantic, panicked, and scared. At one point an editor told her she didn't have to use the child's name, which eventually led her to a fateful thought: She could simply make the whole thing up. It was midnight on one of Sager's nights off when he was awakened by a call from Cooke. "I found the kid," she told him. "His name is Tyrone."

Mike Sager is a bestselling author and accomplished magazine writer. A former Washington Post staff writer and Rolling Stone contributing editor, he has been an Esquire writer-at-large for 19 years. He is the founder of TheSagerGroup, a boutique publishing house.

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Janet Cooke entered the acre-square newsroom of The Washington Post wearing a red wool suit and a white silk shirt. It was her first day of work. She was two hours late. She'd gotten lost walking the three blocks from her hotel. It was the third day of 1980, the beginning of a new chapter [...]

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Meanwhile, American Heritage magazine asked Daniel Aaron, a professor of English at Harvard , to assess the trilogy's importance. He called it the plum candidate for Great American Novel status. '' 'U.S.A.' inspired many imitations, not the least by Dos Passos himself after his radical passions had chilled, but none matched its energy and glow,'' Mr. Aaron wrote.

But if Dos Passos' experimental complexities are responsible for his powerful prose, they are also responsible for his eclipse from the popular imagination. ''U.S.A.'' offers no memorable characters like Jay Gatsby or Nick Adams, and it's an utterly despairing book. Praising Dos Passos' modernist technique, the critic Alfred Kazin once explained that the hero of his fiction was not a person but an abstraction, ''a conveyor belt carrying Americans through some vast Ford plant of the human spirit.''

Enamored of Theodore Dreiser's naturalism and James Joyce's modernism, Dos Passos tried to morph the two traditions. Various scholars have labeled his literary style collage, panoramic, expressionistic, cinemascopic and super-naturalistic. What has been called his newsreel technique, which interwove topical events and real people like J. P. Morgan, the Wright Brothers and Franklin D. Roosevelt, managed to capture the frenetic drumbeat of 20th-century America in its dawning decades.

While ''U.S.A.'' is Dos Passos' best-known work, Mr. Aaron and Townsend Ludington, the editor of the new Library of America volumes and author of ''John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey'' (E. P. Dutton, 1980), argue that his 1925 satiric novel, ''Manhattan Transfer,'' deserves similar praise. After reading it, Sinclair Lewis declared Dos Passos had created a ''whole new school of writing.'' New Yorkers groaned over the condescending descriptions of them as ''cave dwellers,'' but Europeans embraced ''Manhattan Transfer,'' in Ernest Hemingway's words, as ''a spiritual Baedeker to New York.'' One character thinks of New York as having a ''sky of beaten lead that never snows,'' while another closes down his shop, posting a sign: ''WE HAVE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE!''

That bleakness is characteristic of Dos Passos' work. As a student at Harvard, he grew obsessed with the war that was destroying Europe. In 1917, just after his father died, he left the United States to study in Spain, followed by service in the ambulance corps in France and Italy. His grisly trench-warfare experiences would forever haunt his fiction and his life.

As he wrote in his diary: ''The grey crooked fingers of the dead, the dark look of dirty mangled bodies, their groans and joltings in the ambulances, the vast tom-tom of guns, the ripping tear shells make when they explode, the song of shells outgoing, like vast woodcocks -- their contented whirr as they near their mark -- the twang of fragments like a harp broken in the air -- and the rattle of stones and mud on your helmet -- and through everything the vast despair of unavoidable death of lives wrenched out of the channels -- all for ludicrous tomfoolery of governments.''

Dos Passos' bitter feelings about World War I are fully explored in his first two novels -- ''One Man's Initiation'' (1920) and ''Three Soldiers'' (1921) -- which are included, with ''Manhattan Transfer,'' in the new Library of America volumes. Like other Lost Generation writers, he paints a devastating portrait of a civilization gone crazy because of hyperindustrialization and monopoly capitalism.

Although the antiwar books influenced later novelists, from Mr. Mailer to Joseph Heller, reviews for the books were tepid, and Dos Passos was accused of flaunting a degenerate strain of anti-American radicalism.

Also included in the new books are his travel writings. Dos Passos was an intrepid globe-trotter. ''He liked to keep his impressions as fresh as possible,'' his daughter, Lucy Dos Passos Coggin, said recently from her home in Richmond, Va. He made long trips to Easter Island, Brazil, Iowa, Cuba, Mexico, the Middle East and, during World War II, the Pacific Islands. ''Travel honed his writing edge keenly and constantly,'' she added.

The travel book that is likely to trigger the greatest interest now is ''Orient Express'' (1927), the story of his remarkable 1921-22 journey to Russia and the Middle East, which included three miserable weeks spent in Baghdad, where the food was awful and his hotel rat-infested. He observed the creation of Iraq by the British, and wrote about Islamic fundamentalism, Babylon and living in desert terrain, where water is scarce. He grew a beard and wore Muslim robes, and eventually convinced the chief of British intelligence for the entire Iraqi region, Gertrude Bell, to help him travel some 500 miles across the Syrian Desert, from Baghdad to Damascus, by camel caravan. Comparing the trek to climbing Mount Everest, Dos Passos offers vivid descriptions of the region's sandstone cliffs, star-drenched skies, ancient prayers and Bedouin warriors.

He painted watercolors there, too, some published by the Library of America to correspond with the text. (From Sept. 25 to Dec. 7, the Marsh Art Gallery at the University of Richmond is hosting a show dedicated to his paintings and sketches.)

Much has been written about Dos Passos' intellectual odyssey from a pro-Communist who supported William Z. Forster for president in 1932 to a conservative who supported Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. But as the Library of America volumes show, Dos Passos, who died in 1970, was fairly consistent in his libertarian convictions. His heroes in his later years were Walt Whitman, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Saul Bellow and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

''He was always against power,'' his daughter explained. ''He didn't like labels and 'isms' because they fell short of describing a particular person. He never bought into credos, yet he was moderate in his own life and highly disciplined in his work.''
Correction: September 3, 2003, Wednesday An article in Arts & Ideas on Saturday about new interest in the writing of John Dos Passos misspelled the surname of the Communist Party candidate whom Dos Passos supported for president in 1932. He was William Z. Foster, not Forster. Correction: September 6, 2003, Saturday A picture caption in Arts & Ideas last Saturday with an article about new interest in the writing of John Dos Passos referred incompletely to the trip he took in 1921 and 1922 on which he painted ''Mogador,'' a watercolor of a Moroccan city now known as Essaouira. He traveled to Europe, Central Asia and North Africa, in addition to the Middle East.

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A Second Act for Dos Passos And His Panoramic Writings

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Meanwhile, American Heritage magazine asked Daniel Aaron, a professor of English at Harvard , to assess the trilogy's importance. He called it the plum candidate for Great American Novel status. '' 'U.S.A.' inspired many imitations, not the least by Dos Passos himself after his radical passions had chilled, but none matched its energy and glow,'' Mr. Aaron wrote.

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Upton Sinclair - The Jungle, Books & Quotes

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Upton Sinclair was an activist writer whose works, including ‘The Jungle’ and ‘Boston,’ often uncovered social injustices.

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Benjamin Franklin, (born January 17 [January 6, Old Style], 1706, Boston, Massachusetts [U.S.]-died April 17, 1790, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.), American printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat. One of the foremost of the Founding Fathers, Franklin helped draft the Declaration of Independence and was one of its signers, represented the United States in France during the American Revolution, and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He made important contributions to science, especially in the understanding of electricity, and is remembered for the wit, wisdom, and elegance of his writing.

Early life

Franklin was born the 10th son of the 17 children of a man who made soap and candles, one of the lowliest of the artisan crafts. In an age that privileged the firstborn son, Franklin was, as he tartly noted in his Autobiography, "the youngest Son of the youngest Son for five Generations back." He learned to read very early and had one year in grammar school and another under a private teacher, but his formal education ended at age 10. At 12 he was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer. His mastery of the printer's trade, of which he was proud to the end of his life, was achieved between 1718 and 1723. In the same period he read tirelessly and taught himself to write effectively.

His first enthusiasm was for poetry, but, discouraged with the quality of his own, he gave it up. Prose was another matter. Young Franklin discovered a volume of The Spectator-featuring Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele's famous periodical essays, which had appeared in England in 1711-12-and saw in it a means for improving his writing. He read these Spectator papers over and over, copied and recopied them, and then tried to recall them from memory. He even turned them into poetry and then back into prose. Franklin realized, as all the Founders did, that writing competently was such a rare talent in the 18th century that anyone who could do it well immediately attracted attention. "Prose writing" became, as he recalled in his Autobiography, "of great Use to me in the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my Advancement."

In 1721 James Franklin founded a weekly newspaper, the New-England Courant, to which readers were invited to contribute. Benjamin, now 16, read and perhaps set in type these contributions and decided that he could do as well himself. In 1722 he wrote a series of 14 essays signed "Silence Dogood" in which he lampooned everything from funeral eulogies to the students of Harvard College. For one so young to assume the persona of a middle-aged woman was a remarkable feat, and Franklin took "exquisite Pleasure" in the fact that his brother and others became convinced that only a learned and ingenious wit could have written these essays.

Late in 1722 James Franklin got into trouble with the provincial authorities and was forbidden to print or publish the Courant. To keep the paper going, he discharged his younger brother from his original apprenticeship and made him the paper's nominal publisher. New indentures were drawn up but not made public. Some months later, after a bitter quarrel, Benjamin secretly left home, sure that James would not "go to law" and reveal the subterfuge he had devised.

Youthful adventures

Failing to find work in New York City, Franklin at age 17 went on to Quaker-dominated Philadelphia, a much more open and religiously tolerant place than Puritan Boston. One of the most memorable scenes of the Autobiography is the description of his arrival on a Sunday morning, tired and hungry. Finding a bakery, he asked for three pennies' worth of bread and got "three great Puffy Rolls." Carrying one under each arm and munching on the third, he walked up Market Street past the door of the Read family, where stood Deborah, his future wife. She saw him and "thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward ridiculous Appearance."

A few weeks later he was rooming at the Reads' and employed as a printer. By the spring of 1724 he was enjoying the companionship of other young men with a taste for reading, and he was also being urged to set up in business for himself by the governor of Pennsylvania, Sir William Keith. At Keith's suggestion, Franklin returned to Boston to try to raise the necessary capital. His father thought him too young for such a venture, so Keith offered to foot the bill himself and arranged Franklin's passage to England so that he could choose his type and make connections with London stationers and booksellers. Franklin exchanged "some promises" about marriage with Deborah Read and, with a young friend, James Ralph, as his companion, sailed for London in November 1724, just over a year after arriving in Philadelphia. Not until his ship was well out at sea did he realize that Governor Keith had not delivered the letters of credit and introduction he had promised.

In London Franklin quickly found employment in his trade and was able to lend money to Ralph, who was trying to establish himself as a writer. The two young men enjoyed the theatre and the other pleasures of the city, including women. While in London, Franklin wrote A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725), a Deistical pamphlet inspired by his having set type for William Wollaston's moral tract, The Religion of Nature Delineated. Franklin argued in his essay that since human beings have no real freedom of choice, they are not morally responsible for their actions. This was perhaps a nice justification for his self-indulgent behaviour in London and his ignoring of Deborah, to whom he had written only once. He later repudiated the pamphlet, burning all but one of the copies still in his possession.

By 1726 Franklin was tiring of London. He considered becoming an itinerant teacher of swimming, but, when Thomas Denham, a Quaker merchant, offered him a clerkship in his store in Philadelphia with a prospect of fat commissions in the West Indian trade, he decided to return home.

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Benjamin Franklin | Biography, Inventions, Books, American Revolution, & Facts

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Benjamin Franklin, American printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat. One of the foremost of the American Founding Fathers, he helped draft the Declaration of Independence. He also made important contributions to science, especially in the understanding of technology.

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Prepared by Suzanne Marrs
Eudora Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence, Millsaps College
Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty and Chestina Andrews Welty, Eudora Welty grew up in a close-knit and loving family. From her father she inherited a "love for all instruments that instruct and fascinate," from her mother a passion for reading and for language. With her brothers, Edward Jefferson Welty and Walter Andrews Welty, she shared bonds of devotion, camaraderie, and humor. Nourished by such a background, Welty became perhaps the most distinguished graduate of the Jackson Public School system. She attended Davis Elementary School when Miss Lorena Duling was principal and graduated from Jackson's Central High School in 1925. Her collegiate years were spent first at the Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus and then at the University of Wisconsin, where she received her bachelor's degree. From Wisconsin, Welty went on to graduate study at the Columbia University School of Business.

After her college years, Welty worked at WJDX radio station, wrote society columns for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and served as a Junior Publicity Agent for the Works Progress Administration. During these years, she took many photographs, and in 1936 and 1937 they were exhibited in New York; but they were not published as she had wished. Her first publication was instead a short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman." In 1936, the editor of Manuscript literary magazine called it "one of the best stories we have ever read."

Her first book was published five years later. In A Curtain of Green, Welty included seventeen stories that move from the comic to the tragic, from realistic portraits to surrealistic ones, and that display a wry wit, the keen observation of detail, and a sure rendering of dialect. Here she at times translated into fiction memories of people and places she had earlier photographed, and the volume's three stories focusing upon African American characters exemplify the empathy that was present in her photos. Toni Morrison has observed that Eudora Welty wrote "about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write. It's not patronizing, not romanticizing - it's the way they should be written about."

In 1942, Welty followed with a very different book, a novella partaking of folklore, fairy tale, and Mississippi's legendary history. A year after this novella appeared, Welty published a third book of fiction, stories that were collected as The Wide Net (1943) and that were fewer in number and more darkly lyrical than those in her first volume. Then came Delta Wedding, her first novel. Set in the Mississippi Delta of 1923, though published in 1946, the book was originally criticized as a nostalgic portrait of the plantation South, but critical opinion has since counteracted such views, seeing in the novel, to use Albert Devlin's words, the "probing for a humane order."

In Welty's next book, the unity of the novel is missing but not wholly. The Golden Apples (1949) includes seven interlocking stories that trace life in the fictional Morgana, Mississippi, from the turn of the century until the late 1940s. When Welty began writing the stories, however, she had no idea that they would be connected. Midway through the composition process, she finally realized that she was writing about a common cast of characters, that the characters of one story seemed to be younger or older versions of the characters in other stories, and she decided to create a book that was neither novel nor story collection. It is perhaps the greatest triumph of her distinguished career, an unmatched example of the story cycle.

After the publication of this book, Welty traveled to Europe and drew upon her European experiences in two stories she would eventually group with "Circe," a story narrated by the witch-goddess, and with four stories set in the American South. Though the interlocking nature of The Golden Apples is gone, a new theme emerges. Most of these stories investigate the ways individuals can live and create meaning for themselves without being rooted in time and place. Even before she pulled The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) together, she published The Ponder Heart (1954), an extended dramatic monologue delivered by Edna Earle, a character who truly is a character.

Welty had produced seven distinctive books in fourteen years, but that rate of production came to a startling halt. Personal tragedies forced her to put writing on the back burner for more than a decade. Then in 1970 she graced the publishing world with Losing Battles, a long novel narrated largely through the conversation of the aunts, uncles, and cousins attending a rambunctious 1930s family reunion. Two years later came a taut, spare novel set in the late 1960s and describing the experience of loss and grief which had so recently been her own. Welty would uncharacteristically incorporate a good bit of biographical detail in The Optimist's Daughter, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.

Welty's exploration of such different subjects and techniques involved, of course, more than art for art's sake. In her essay, "Words into Fiction," she describes fiction as "a personal act of vision." She does not suggest that the artist's vision conveys a truth which we must all accept. Instead, she suggests, the artist, must look squarely at the mysteries of human experiences without trying to resolve them. Eudora Welty's ability to reveal rather than explain mystery is what first drew Richard Ford to her work. It drew Reynolds Price as well. Price, though, focuses not on the term mystery, but on the complexity of her vision. He writes that Eudora is not "the mild, sonorous, 'affirmative' kind of artist whom America loves to clasp to its bosom," but is instead a writer with "a granite core in every tale: as complete and unassailable an image of human relations as any in our art, tragic of necessity but also comic."

Welty's achievements include more than her fiction. Her early photographs eventually appeared in book form: Her photograph book One Time, One Place was published in 1971, and more photographs have subsequently been published in books titled Photographs (1989), Country Churchyards (2000), and Eudora Welty as Photographer (2009). Her essays and book reviews were collected in the 1978 volume titled The Eye of the Story, and her autobiography One Writer's Beginnings, published in 1984 by Harvard University Press, was a nationwide best seller. For a time during her last three decades, Welty periodically worked on fiction, but completed nothing to her own high standards, standards that made her a literary celebrity. She appeared on televised interviews, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor, served as the subject of a BBC documentary, and was chosen as the first living writer to be published in the Library of America series. After a short illness and as the result of cardio-pulmonary failure, Eudora Welty died on 23 July 2001, in Jackson, Mississippi, her lifelong home, where she is buried.

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Eudora Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence, Millsaps College Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty and Chestina Andrews Welty, Eudora Welty grew up in a close-knit and loving family. From her father she inherited a "love for all instruments that instruct and fascinate," from her mother a passion for reading and for language.

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Joseph Pulitzer - Historic Missourians - The State Historical Society of Missouri

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The Civil War was a military conflict that began on April 12, 1861, when Southern forces fired on Fort Sumter outside of Charleston, South Carolina. Several Southern states had seceded from the United States (also known as the Union) and formed the Confederate States of America (also referred to as the Confederacy) out of fear that the United States' newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, would not allow the expansion of slavery into new western states.

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The History Place - Great Speeches Collection: Frederick Douglass Speech - The Hypocrisy of American Slavery

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At The History Place - Part of our Great Speeches series.

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I like to begin by looking at what makes Welty seem simple (her lovely sentences, her homey metaphors, her "impulse to praise"). The difficulty here is not a lack of accessibility, but rather that Welty seems too accessible, too superficial. The challenge is to get students to read Welty seriously, critically, analytically.

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Frederick Douglass was a leader in the abolitionist movement, an early champion of women’s rights and author of ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.’

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Joseph Pulitzer was born to a wealthy family of Magyar-Jewish origin in Mako, Hungary on April 10, 1847. The elder Pulitzer (a grain merchant) retired in Budapest and Joseph grew up and was educated there in private schools and by tutors.

Early years

Restive at the age of seventeen, the gangling 6'2" youth decided to become a soldier and tried in turn to enlist in the Austrian Army, Napoleon's Foreign Legion for duty in Mexico, and the British Army for service in India. He was rebuffed because of weak eyesight and frail health, which were to plague him for the rest of his life. However, in Hamburg, Germany, he encountered a bounty recruiter for the U.S. Union Army and contracted to enlist as a substitute for a draftee, a procedure permitted under the Civil War draft system.

At Boston he jumped ship and, as the legend goes, swam to shore, determined to keep the enlistment bounty for himself rather than leave it to the agent. Pulitzer collected the bounty by enlisting for a year in the Lincoln Cavalry, which suited him since there were many Germans in the unit. He was fluent in German and French but spoke very little English. Later, he worked his way to St. Louis. While doing odd jobs there, such as muleteer, baggage handler, and waiter, he immersed himself in the city's Mercantile Library, studying English and the law.

Beginning of a career

His great career opportunity came in a unique manner in the library's chess room. Observing the game of two habitues, he astutely critiqued a move and the players, impressed, engaged Pulitzer in conversation. The players were editors of the leading German language daily, Westliche Post, and a job offer followed.

Four years later, in 1872, the young Pulitzer, who had built a reputation as a tireless enterprising journalist, was offered a controlling interest in the paper by the nearly bankrupt owners. At age 25, Pulitzer became a publisher and there followed a series of shrewd business deals from which he emerged in 1878 as the owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and a rising figure on the journalistic scene.

Personal changes

Earlier in the same year, he and Kate Davis, a socially prominent Washingtonian woman, were married in the Protestant Episcopal Church. The Hungarian immigrant youth - once a vagrant on the slum streets of St. Louis and taunted as "Joey the Jew" - had been transformed. Now he was an American citizen and as speaker, writer, and editor had mastered English extraordinarily well. Elegantly dressed, wearing a handsome, reddish-brown beard and pince-nez glasses, he mixed easily with the social elite of St. Louis, enjoying dancing at fancy parties and horseback riding in the park. This lifestyle was abandoned abruptly when he came into the ownership of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

James Wyman Barrett, the last city editor of The New York World, records in his biography Joseph Pulitzer and His World how Pulitzer, in taking hold of the Post-Dispatch, "worked at his desk from early morning until midnight or later, interesting himself in every detail of the paper." Appealing to the public to accept that his paper was their champion, Pulitzer splashed investigative articles and editorials assailing government corruption, wealthy tax-dodgers, and gamblers. This populist appeal was effective, circulation mounted, and the paper prospered. Pulitzer would have been pleased to know that in the conduct of the Pulitzer Prize system which he later established, more awards in journalism would go to exposure of corruption than to any other subject.

Failing health

Pulitzer paid a price for his unsparingly rigorous work at his newspaper. His health was undermined and, with his eyes failing, Pulitzer and his wife set out in 1883 for New York to board a ship on a doctor-ordered European vacation. Stubbornly, instead of boarding the steamer in New York, he met with Jay Gould, the financier, and negotiated the purchase of The New York World,which was in financial straits.

Putting aside his serious health concerns, Pulitzer immersed himself in its direction, bringing about what Barrett describes as a "one-man revolution" in the editorial policy, content, and format of The World. He employed some of the same techniques that had built up the circulation of the Post-Dispatch. He crusaded against public and private corruption, filled the news columns with a spate of sensationalized features, made the first extensive use of illustrations, and staged news stunts. In one of the most successful promotions, The World raised public subscriptions for the building of a pedestal at the entrance to the New York harbor so that the Statue of Liberty, which was stranded in France awaiting shipment, could be emplaced.

More difficulties

The formula worked so well that in the next decade the circulation of The World in all its editions climbed to more than 600,000, and it reigned as the largest circulating newspaper in the country. But unexpectedly Pulitzer himself became a victim of the battle for circulation when Charles Anderson Dana, publisher of The Sun, frustrated by the success of The World launched vicious personal attacks on him as "the Jew who had denied his race and religion." The unrelenting campaign was designed to alienate New York's Jewish community from The World.

Pulitzer's health was fractured further during this ordeal and in 1890, at the age of 43, he withdrew from the editorship of The World and never returned to its newsroom. Virtually blind, having in his severe depression succumbed also to an illness that made him excruciatingly sensitive to noise, Pulitzer went abroad frantically seeking cures. He failed to find them, and the next two decades of his life he spent largely in soundproofed "vaults," as he referred to them, aboard his yacht, Liberty, in the "Tower of Silence" at his vacation retreat in Bar Harbor, Maine, and at his New York mansion. During those years, although he traveled very frequently, Pulitzer managed, nevertheless, to maintain the closest editorial and business direction of his newspapers. To ensure secrecy in his communications he relied on a code that filled a book containing some 20,000 names and terms.

War years

During the years 1896 to 1898 Pulitzer was drawn into a bitter circulation battle with William Randolph Hearst's Journal in which there were no apparent restraints on sensationalism or fabrication of news. When the Cubans rebelled against Spanish rule, Pulitzer and Hearst sought to outdo each other in whipping up outrage against the Spanish. Both called for war against Spain after the U.S. battleship Maine mysteriously blew up and sank in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. Congress reacted to the outcry with a war resolution. After the four-month war, Pulitzer withdrew from what had become known as "yellow journalism."

The World became more restrained and served as the influential editorial voice on many issues of the Democratic Party. In the view of historians, Pulitzer's lapse into "yellow journalism" was outweighed by his public service achievements. He waged courageous and often successful crusades against corrupt practices in government and business. He was responsible to a large extent for passage of antitrust legislation and regulation of the insurance industry.

In 1909, The World exposed a fraudulent payment of $40 million by the United States to the French Panama Canal Company. The federal government lashed back at The World by indicting Pulitzer for criminally libeling President Theodore Roosevelt and the banker J.P. Morgan, among others. Pulitzer refused to retreat, and The World persisted in its investigation. When the courts dismissed the indictments, Pulitzer was applauded for a crucial victory on behalf of freedom of the press.

In May 1904, writing in The North American Review in support of his proposal for the founding of a school of journalism, Pulitzer summarized his credo: "Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations."

1912 - present

In 1912, one year after Pulitzer's death aboard his yacht, the Columbia School of Journalism was founded, and the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917 under the supervision of the advisory board to which he had entrusted his mandate. ( Relevant extracts from Pulitzer's will may be read here.) Pulitzer envisioned an advisory board composed principally of newspaper publishers. Others would include the president of Columbia University and scholars, and "persons of distinction who are not journalists or editors."

Today, the 19-member board is composed mainly of leading editors and columnists. Four academics also serve, including the president of Columbia University and the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. The dean and the administrator of the prizes are non-voting members. The chair rotates annually to the most senior member or members. The board is self-perpetuating in the election of members. Voting members may serve three terms of three years. In the selection of the members of the board and of the juries, close attention is given to professional excellence and affiliation, as well as diversity in terms of gender, ethnic background, geographical distribution and size of news organization.

Pulitzer and His Prizes
This biography - along with a linked history of The Pulitzer Prizes and guide to the administration of the Prizes - was written by Seymour Topping, former Administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes and now San Paolo Professor Emeritus of International Journalismat Columbia University. The three-part work was adapted from his foreword to Who's Who of Pulitzer Prize Winners by Elizabeth A. Brennan and Elizabeth C. Clarage, © 1999 by The Oryx Press. Used with permission from The Oryx Press, 4041 N. Central Ave., Suite 700 Phoenix, AZ 85012. From 1993 to 2002, Topping administered the Prizes and was San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. After serving in World War II, Topping worked for The Associated Press as a correspondent in China, Indochina, London and Berlin. In 1959, he joined The New York Times, where he remained for 34 years, serving as a foreign correspondent, foreign editor, managing editor and editorial director of the company's regional newspapers. Topping's three-part work was updated in 2013 by Sig Gissler, who suceeded Topping as Administrator from 2002 to 2014, and by digital content manager Sean Murphy in 2017-2018.
Pulitzer's Ancestry: A Correction

Previous iterations of this biography stated that Joseph Pulitzer's mother was a "devout Roman Catholic" of German ancestry in keeping with a widespread American belief promulgated in the Encyclopedia Judaica and other sources. However, Hungarian historian András Csillag conclusively established in a 1985 article (published in condensed form in English as "Joseph Pulitzer's Roots in Europe: A Genealogical History" by American Jewish Archives in 1987) that Louise Berger was born to a Hungarian Jewish family at Pest in 1823. As reported by Robert A. Cohn of the St. Louis Jewish Light in 2011, research by independent scholar James Palmer has further corroborated Csillag's findings over the intervening decades. Palmer's biography of Albert Pulitzer may be read here. We thank journalist Nate Bloom for his diligent efforts in bringing this matter to our attention.

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Joseph Pulitzer was born to a wealthy family of Magyar-Jewish origin in Mako, Hungary on April 10, 1847. The elder Pulitzer (a grain merchant) retired in Budapest and Joseph grew up and was educated there in private schools and by tutors.

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'In Cold Blood,' Truman Capote's Achievement and Undoing

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The nonfiction novel "In Cold Blood" made Truman Capote's career but may have ruined his life.

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Eudora Welty: Eudora Welty, American short-story writer and novelist whose work is mainly focused with great precision on the regional manners of people inhabiting a small Mississippi town that resembles her own birthplace and the Delta country. Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women before

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Truman Capote was a trailblazing writer of Southern descent known for the works Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, among others.

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Who Was Benjamin Franklin?

Benjamin Franklin was a Founding Father and a polymath, inventor, scientist, printer, politician, freemason and diplomat. Franklin helped to draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and he negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War.

His scientific pursuits included investigations into electricity, mathematics and mapmaking. A writer known for his wit and wisdom, Franklin also published Poor Richard's Almanack, invented bifocal glasses and organized the first successful American lending library.

Early Life

Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, in what was then known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Franklin's father, English-born soap and candlemaker Josiah Franklin, had seven children with first wife, Anne Child, and 10 more with second wife, Abiah Folger. Franklin was his 15th child and youngest son.

Franklin learned to read at an early age, and despite his success at the Boston Latin School, he stopped his formal schooling at 10 to work full-time in his cash-strapped father's candle and soap shop. Dipping wax and cutting wicks didn't fire the young boy's imagination, however.

Perhaps to dissuade him from going to sea as one of his other sons had done, Josiah apprenticed 12-year-old Franklin at the print shop run by his older brother James.

Although James mistreated and frequently beat his younger brother, Franklin learned a great deal about newspaper publishing and adopted a similar brand of subversive politics under the printer's tutelage.

Silence Dogood

When James refused to publish any of his brother's writing, 16-year-old Franklin adopted the pseudonym Mrs. Silence Dogood, and "her" 14 imaginative and witty letters delighted readers of his brother's newspaper, The New England Courant. James grew angry, however, when he learned that his apprentice had penned the letters.

Tired of his brother's "harsh and tyrannical" behavior, Franklin fled Boston in 1723 although he had three years remaining on a legally binding contract with his master.

He escaped to New York before settling in Philadelphia and began working with another printer. Philadelphia became his home base for the rest of his life.

Living in London

Encouraged by Pennsylvania Governor William Keith to set up his own print shop, Franklin left for London in 1724 to purchase supplies from stationers, booksellers and printers. When the teenager arrived in England, however, he felt duped when Keith's letters of introduction never arrived as promised.

Although forced to find work at London's print shops, Franklin took full advantage of the city's pleasures-attending theater performances, mingling with the locals in coffee houses and continuing his lifelong passion for reading.

A self-taught swimmer who crafted his own wooden flippers, Franklin performed long-distance swims on the Thames River. (In 1968, he was inducted as an honorary member of the International Swimming Hall of Fame.)

In 1725 Franklin published his first pamphlet, "A Dissertation upon Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain," which argued that humans lack free will and, thus, are not morally responsible for their actions. (Franklin later repudiated this thought and burned all but one copy of the pamphlet still in his possession.)

Wife and Children

In 1723, after Franklin moved from Boston to Philadelphia, he lodged at the home of John Read, where he met and courted his landlord's daughter Deborah.

After Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726, he discovered that Deborah had married in the interim, only to be abandoned by her husband just months after the wedding.

The future Founding Father rekindled his romance with Deborah Read and he took her as his common-law wife in 1730. Around that time, Franklin fathered a son, William, out of wedlock who was taken in by the couple. The pair's first son, Francis, was born in 1732, but he died four years later of smallpox. The couple's only daughter, Sarah, was born in 1743.

The two times Franklin moved to London, in 1757 and again in 1764, it was without Deborah, who refused to leave Philadelphia. His second stay was the last time the couple saw each other. Franklin would not return home before Deborah passed away in 1774 from a stroke at the age of 66.

In 1762, Franklin's son William took office as New Jersey's royal governor, a position his father arranged through his political connections in the British government. Franklin's later support for the patriot cause put him at odds with his loyalist son. When the New Jersey militia stripped William Franklin of his post as royal governor and imprisoned him in 1776, his father chose not to intercede on his behalf.

Life in Philadelphia

After his return to Philadelphia in 1726, Franklin held varied jobs including bookkeeper, shopkeeper and currency cutter. In 1728 he returned to a familiar trade - printing paper currency - in New Jersey before partnering with a friend to open his own print shop in Philadelphia that published government pamphlets and books.

In 1730 Franklin was named the official printer of Pennsylvania. By that time, he had formed the "Junto," a social and self-improvement study group for young men that met every Friday to debate morality, philosophy and politics.

When Junto members sought to expand their reading choices, Franklin helped to incorporate America's first subscription library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, in 1731.

In 1729 Franklin published another pamphlet, "A Modest Enquiry into The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency," which advocated for an increase in the money supply to stimulate the economy.

With the cash Franklin earned from his money-related treatise, he was able to purchase The Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper from a former boss. Under his ownership, the struggling newspaper was transformed into the most widely-read paper in the colonies and became one of the first to turn a profit.

He had less luck in 1732 when he launched the first German-language newspaper in the colonies, the short-lived Philadelphische Zeitung. Nonetheless, Franklin's prominence and success grew during the 1730s.

Franklin amassed real estate and businesses and organized the volunteer Union Fire Company to counteract dangerous fire hazards in Philadelphia. He joined the Freemasons in 1731 and was eventually elected grand master of the Masons of Pennsylvania.

Poor Richard's Almanack

At the end of 1732, Franklin published the first edition of Poor Richard's Almanack.

In addition to weather forecasts, astronomical information and poetry, the almanac-which Franklin published for 25 consecutive years-included proverbs and Franklin's witty maxims such as "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise" and "He that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas."

Scientist and Inventor

In the 1740s, Franklin expanded into science and entrepreneurship. His 1743 pamphlet "A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge" underscored his interests and served as the founding document of the American Philosophical Society, the first scientific society in the colonies.

By 1748, the 42-year-old Franklin had become one of the richest men in Pennsylvania, and he became a soldier in the Pennsylvania militia. He turned his printing business over to a partner to give himself more time to conduct scientific experiments. He moved into a new house in 1748.

Inventions

Franklin was a prolific inventor and scientist who was responsible for the following inventions:

Franklin stove: Franklin's first invention, created around 1740, provided more heat with less fuel.

Bifocals: Anyone tired of switching between two pairs of glasses understands why Franklin developed bifocals that could be used for both distance and reading.

Armonica:Franklin's inventions took on a musical bent when, in 1761, he commenced development on the armonica, a musical instrument composed of spinning glass bowls on a shaft. Both Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed music for the strange instrument.

Rocking chair

Flexible catheter

American penny

Franklin also discovered the Gulf Stream after his return trip across the Atlantic Ocean from London in 1775. He began to speculate about why the westbound trip always took longer, and his measurements of ocean temperatures led to his discovery of the existence of the Gulf Stream. This knowledge served to cut two weeks off the previous sailing time from Europe to North America.

Franklin even devised a new "scheme" for the alphabet that proposed to eliminate the letters C, J, Q, W, X and Y as redundant.

Franklin's self-education earned him honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, England's University of Oxford and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

In 1749, Franklin wrote a pamphlet concerning the education of youth in Pennsylvania that resulted in the establishment of the Academy of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FACT CARD

Electricity

In 1752, Franklin conducted the famous kite-and-key experiment to demonstrate that lightning was electricity and soon after invented the lightning rod.

His investigations into electrical phenomena were compiled into "Experiments and Observations on Electricity," published in England in 1751. He coined new electricity-related terms that are still part of the lexicon, such as battery, charge, conductor and electrify.

Slavery

In 1748, Franklin acquired the first of several slaves to work in his new home and in the print shop. Franklin's views on slavery evolved over the following decades to the point that he considered the institution inherently evil, and thus, he freed his slaves in the 1760s.

Later in life, he became more vociferous in his opposition to slavery. Franklin served as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and wrote many tracts urging the abolition of slavery. In 1790 he petitioned the U.S. Congress to end slavery and the slave trade.

Election to the Government

Franklin became a member of Philadelphia's city council in 1748 and a justice of the peace the following year. In 1751, he was elected a Philadelphia alderman and a representative to the Pennsylvania Assembly, a position to which he was re-elected annually until 1764. Two years later, he accepted a royal appointment as deputy postmaster general of North America.

When the French and Indian War began in 1754, Franklin called on the colonies to band together for their common defense, which he dramatized in The Pennsylvania Gazette with a cartoon of a snake cut into sections with the caption "Join or Die."

He represented Pennsylvania at the Albany Congress, which adopted his proposal to create a unified government for the 13 colonies. Franklin's "Plan of Union," however, failed to be ratified by the colonies.

In 1757 Franklin was appointed by the Pennsylvania Assembly to serve as the colony's agent in England. Franklin sailed to London to negotiate a long-standing dispute with the proprietors of the colony, the Penn family, taking William and his two slaves but leaving behind Deborah and Sarah.

He spent much of the next two decades in London, where he was drawn to the high society and intellectual salons of the cosmopolitan city.

After Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1762, he toured the colonies to inspect its post offices.

Stamp Act and Declaration of Independence

After Franklin lost his seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1764, he returned to London as the colony's agent. Franklin returned at a tense time in Great Britain's relations with the American colonies.

The British Parliament's passage of the Stamp Act in March 1765 imposed a highly unpopular tax on all printed materials for commercial and legal use in the American colonies. Since Franklin purchased stamps for his printing business and nominated a friend as the Pennsylvania stamp distributor, some colonists thought Franklin implicitly supported the new tax, and rioters in Philadelphia even threatened his house.

Franklin's passionate denunciation of the tax in testimony before Parliament, however, contributed to the Stamp Act's repeal in 1766.

Two years later he penned a pamphlet, "Causes of the American Discontents before 1768," and he soon became an agent for Massachusetts, Georgia and New Jersey as well. Franklin fanned the flames of revolution by sending the private letters of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson to America.

The letters called for the restriction of the rights of colonists, which caused a firestorm after their publication by Boston newspapers. In the wake of the scandal, Franklin was removed as deputy postmaster general, and he returned to North America in 1775 as a devotee of the patriot cause.

In 1775, Franklin was elected to the Second Continental Congress and appointed the first postmaster general for the colonies. In 1776, he was appointed commissioner to Canada and was one of five men to draft the Declaration of Independence.

Life in Paris

After voting for independence in 1776, Franklin was elected commissioner to France, making him essentially the first U.S. ambassador to France. He set sail to negotiate a treaty for the country's military and financial support.

Much has been made of Franklin's years in Paris, chiefly his rich romantic life in his nine years abroad after Deborah's death. At the age of 74, he even proposed marriage to a widow named Madame Helvetius, but she rejected him.

Franklin was embraced in France as much, if not more, for his wit and intellectual standing in the scientific community as for his status as a political appointee from a fledgling country.

His reputation facilitated respect and entrees into closed communities, including the court of King Louis XVI. And it was his adept diplomacy that led to the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War. After almost a decade in France, Franklin returned to the United States in 1785.

Drafting the U.S. Constitution

Franklin was elected in 1787 to represent Pennsylvania at the Constitutional Convention, which drafted and ratified the new U.S. Constitution.

The oldest delegate at the age of 81, Franklin initially supported proportional representation in Congress, but he fashioned the Great Compromise that resulted in proportional representation in the House of Representatives and equal representation by state in the Senate. In 1787, he helped found the Society for Political Inquiries, dedicated to improving knowledge of government.

Franklin was never elected president of the United States. However, he played an important role as one of eight Founding Fathers, helping draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

He also served several roles in the government: He was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly and appointed as the first postmaster general for the colonies as well as diplomat to France. He was a true polymath and entrepreneur, which is no doubt why he is often called the "First American."

Death

Franklin died on April 17, 1790, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the home of his daughter, Sarah Bache. He was 84, suffered from gout and had complained of ailments for some time, completing the final codicil to his will a little more than a year and a half prior to his death.

He bequeathed most of his estate to Sarah and very little to his son William, whose opposition to the patriot cause still stung him. He also donated money that funded scholarships, schools and museums in Boston and Philadelphia.

Franklin had actually written his epitaph when he was 22: "The body of B. Franklin, Printer (Like the Cover of an Old Book Its Contents torn Out And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding) Lies Here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be Lost; For it will (as he Believ'd) Appear once More In a New and More Elegant Edition Revised and Corrected By the Author."

In the end, however, the stone on the grave he shared with his wife in the cemetery of Philadelphia's Christ Church reads simply, "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin 1790."

Accomplishments

The image of Franklin that has come down through history, along with his likeness on the $100 bill, is something of a caricature-a bald man in a frock coat holding a kite string with a key attached. But the scope of things he applied himself to was so broad it seems a shame.

Founding universities and libraries, the post office, shaping the foreign policy of the fledgling United States, helping to draft the Declaration of Independence, publishing newspapers, warming us with the Franklin stove, pioneering advances in science, letting us see with bifocals and lighting our way with electricity-all from a man who never finished school but shaped his life through abundant reading and experience, a strong moral compass and an unflagging commitment to civic duty. Franklin illuminated corners of American life that still have the lingering glow of his attention.
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Benjamin Franklin was a Founding Father and a polymath, inventor, scientist, printer, politician, freemason and diplomat. Franklin helped to draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and he negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War. His scientific pursuits included investigations into electricity, mathematics and mapmaking.

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Joseph Pulitzer (born April 10, 1847, Makó, Hungary-died October 29, 1911, Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.) American newspaper editor and publisher who helped to establish the pattern of the modern newspaper. In his time he was one of the most powerful journalists in the United States.

Having been reared in Budapest, Pulitzer sought a military career and emigrated to the United States in 1864 as a recruit for the Union army in the American Civil War (1861-65). After the war he went to St. Louis, Missouri, where in 1868 he became a reporter on a German-language daily newspaper, the Westliche Post. In 1871 he bought a share of that paper but soon resold it at a profit. Pulitzer had meanwhile become active in politics, and he was elected to the Missouri state legislature in 1869. In 1871-72 he helped to organize the Liberal Republican Party in Missouri, which nominated Horace Greeley for president in 1872. After the party's subsequent collapse, Pulitzer became and remained a lifelong Democrat.

In 1874 Pulitzer acquired another St. Louis German-language paper, the Staats-Zeitung, and advantageously sold its Associated Press franchise to the St. Louis Globe (later Globe-Democrat). Four years afterward he gained control of the St. Louis Dispatch (founded 1864) and the Post (founded 1875) and merged them as the Post-Dispatch, soon the city's dominant evening newspaper. On October 5, 1882, Pulitzer's chief editorial writer shot to death a political opponent of the Post-Dispatch. Public reprobation and his own ill health prompted Pulitzer to shift his newspaper interests to New York City, where he purchased (May 10, 1883) a morning paper, the World, from the financier Jay Gould. He soon turned that paper into the leading journalistic voice of the Democratic Party in the United States. Pulitzer founded the World's evening counterpart, the Evening World, in 1887.

In his newspapers, Pulitzer combined exposés of political corruption and crusading investigative reporting with publicity stunts, blatant self-advertising, and sensationalistic journalism. In an effort to further attract a mass readership, he also introduced such innovations as comics, sports coverage, women's fashion coverage, and illustrations into his newspapers, thus making them vehicles of entertainment as well as of information.

The World eventually became involved in a fierce competition with William Randolph Hearst's New York Morning Journal, and the blatant sensationalism that both newspapers resorted to in espousing the Spanish-American War of 1898 led to the coining of the term " yellow journalism " to describe such practices. Failing eyesight and worsening nervous disorders forced Pulitzer to abandon the management of his newspapers in 1887. He gave up his editorship of them in 1890, but he continued to exercise a close watch over their editorial policies.

In his will, Pulitzer endowed the Columbia University School of Journalism (opened 1912) and established the prestigious Pulitzer Prizes, awarded annually since 1917.

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Joseph Pulitzer, American newspaper editor and publisher who helped establish the pattern of the modern newspaper. In his time he was one of the most powerful journalists in the U.S. In his will, he endowed the Columbia University School of Journalism and established the Pulitzer Prizes, awarded annually since 1917.

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Truman Capote Biography - life, family, childhood, parents, name, story, death, school, mother

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When Truman was nine years old, his mother brought her son to live in Manhattan, New York. He then took on his adopted last name, Capote. He continued to spend summers in the South. He did poorly in school, even though psychological tests proved that his Intelligence Quotient (IQ) was above genius level.

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Who Was Frederick Douglass?

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in or around 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland. Douglass himself was never sure of his exact birth date.

His mother was an enslaved Black women and his father was white and of European descent. He was actually born Frederick Bailey (his mother's name), and took the name Douglass only after he escaped. His full name at birth was "Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey."

After he was separated from his mother as an infant, Douglass lived for a time with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey. However, at the age of six, he was moved away from her to live and work on the Wye House plantation in Maryland.

From there, Douglass was "given" to Lucretia Auld, whose husband, Thomas, sent him to work with his brother Hugh in Baltimore. Douglass credits Hugh's wife Sophia with first teaching him the alphabet. With that foundation, Douglass then taught himself to read and write. By the time he was hired out to work under William Freeland, he was teaching other enslaved people to read using the Bible.

As word spread of his efforts to educate fellow enslaved people, Thomas Auld took him back and transferred him to Edward Covey, a farmer who was known for his brutal treatment of the enslaved people in his charge. Roughly 16 at this time, Douglass was regularly whipped by Covey.

Frederick Douglass Escapes from Slavery

After several failed attempts at escape, Douglass finally left Covey's farm in 1838, first boarding a train to Havre de Grace, Maryland. From there he traveled through Delaware, another slave state, before arriving in New York and the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles.

Once settled in New York, he sent for Anna Murray, a free Black woman from Baltimore he met while in captivity with the Aulds. She joined him, and the two were married in September 1838. They had five children together.

From Slavery to Abolitionist Leader

After their marriage, the young couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they met Nathan and Mary Johnson, a married couple who were born "free persons of color." It was the Johnsons who inspired the couple to take the surname Douglass, after the character in the Sir Walter Scott poem, "The Lady of the Lake."

In New Bedford, Douglass began attending meetings of the abolitionist movement. During these meetings, he was exposed to the writings of abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison.

The two men eventually met when both were asked to speak at an abolitionist meeting, during which Douglass shared his story of slavery and escape. It was Garrison who encouraged Douglass to become a speaker and leader in the abolitionist movement.

By 1843, Douglass had become part of the American Anti-Slavery Society's "Hundred Conventions" project, a six-month tour through the United States. Douglass was physically assaulted several times during the tour by those opposed to the abolitionist movement.

In one particularly brutal attack, in Pendleton, Indiana, Douglass' hand was broken. The injuries never fully healed, and he never regained full use of his hand.

In 1858, radical abolitionist John Brown stayed with Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, as he planned his raid on the U.S. military arsenal at Harper's Ferry, part of his attempt to establish a stronghold of formerly enslaved people in the mountains of Maryland and Virginia. Brown was caught and hanged for masterminding the attack, offering the following prophetic words as his final statement: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."

'Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass'

Two years later, Douglass published the first and most famous of his autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. (He also authored My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass).

In it Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he wrote: "From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom."

He also noted, "Thus is slavery the enemy of both the slave and the slaveholder."

Frederick Douglass in Ireland and Great Britain

Later that same year, Douglass would travel to Ireland and Great Britain. At the time, the former country was just entering the early stages of the Irish Potato Famine, or the Great Hunger.

While overseas, he was impressed by the relative freedom he had as a man of color, compared to what he had experienced in the United States. During his time in Ireland, he met the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell, who became an inspiration for his later work.

In England, Douglass also delivered what would later be viewed as one of his most famous speeches, the so-called "London Reception Speech."

In the speech, he said, "What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of its humanity, boasting of its Christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?... I need not lift up the veil by giving you any experience of my own. Every one that can put two ideas together, must see the most fearful results from such a state of things..."

Frederick Douglass' Abolitionist Paper

When he returned to the United States in 1847, Douglass began publishing his own abolitionist newsletter, the North Star. He also became involved in the movement for women's rights.

He was the only African American to attend the Seneca Falls Convention, a gathering of women's rights activists in New York, in 1848.

He spoke forcefully during the meeting and said, "In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world."

He later included coverage of women's rights issues in the pages of the North Star. The newsletter's name was changed to Frederick Douglass' Paper in 1851, and was published until 1860, just before the start of the Civil War.

Frederick Douglass Quotes

In 1852, he delivered another of his more famous speeches, one that later came to be called "What to a slave is the 4th of July?"

In one section of the speech, Douglass noted, "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."

For the 24th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1886, Douglass delivered a rousing address in Washington, D.C., during which he said, "where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."

Frederick Douglass During the Civil War

During the brutal conflict that divided the still-young United States, Douglass continued to speak and worked tirelessly for the end of slavery and the right of newly freed Black Americans to vote.

Although he supported President Abraham Lincoln in the early years of the Civil War, Douglass fell into disagreement with the politician after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which effectively ended the practice of slavery. Douglass was disappointed that Lincoln didn't use the proclamation to grant formerly enslaved people the right to vote, particularly after they had fought bravely alongside soldiers for the Union army.

It is said, though, that Douglass and Lincoln later reconciled and, following Lincoln's assassination in 1865, and the passage of the 13th amendment, 14th amendment, and 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which, respectively, outlawed slavery, granted formerly enslaved people citizenship and equal protection under the law, and protected all citizens from racial discrimination in voting), Douglass was asked to speak at the dedication of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.'s Lincoln Park in 1876.

Historians, in fact, suggest that Lincoln's widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, bequeathed the late-president's favorite walking stick to Douglass after that speech.

In the post-war Reconstruction era, Douglass served in many official positions in government, including as an ambassador to the Dominican Republic, thereby becoming the first Black man to hold high office. He also continued speaking and advocating for African American and women's rights.

In the 1868 presidential election, he supported the candidacy of former Union general Ulysses S. Grant, who promised to take a hard line against white supremacist-led insurgencies in the post-war South. Grant notably also oversaw passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which was designed to suppress the growing Ku Klux Klan movement.

Frederick Douglass: Later Life and Death

In 1877, Douglass met with Thomas Auld, the man who once "owned" him, and the two reportedly reconciled.

Douglass' wife Anna died in 1882, and he married white activist Helen Pitts in 1884.

In 1888, he became the first African American to receive a vote for President of the United States, during the Republican National Convention. Ultimately, though, Benjamin Harrison received the party nomination.

Douglass remained an active speaker, writer and activist until his death in 1895. He died after suffering a heart attack at home after arriving back from a meeting of the National Council of Women, a women's rights group still in its infancy at the time, in Washington, D.C.

His life's work still serves as an inspiration to those who seek equality and a more just society.

Sources

Frederick Douglas, PBS.org.
Frederick Douglas, National Parks Service, nps.gov.
Frederick Douglas, 1818-1895, Documenting the South, University of North Carolina, docsouth.unc.edu.
Frederick Douglass Quotes, brainyquote.com.
"Reception Speech. At Finsbury Chapel, Moorfields, England, May 12, 1846." USF.edu.
"What to the slave is the 4th of July?" TeachingAmericanHistory.org.
Graham, D.A. (2017). "Donald Trump's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass." The Atlantic.

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Frederick Douglass - Narrative, Quotes & Facts | HISTORY

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Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a prominent activist, author and public speaker. He became a leader in the abolitionist movement, which sought to end the practice of slavery, before and during the Civil War.

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ROBERT W. McCHESNEY is a coeditor of Monthly Review. BEN SCOTT is a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This essay is adapted from the foreword to a new edition of Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check to be published this fall by the University of Illinois Press.

Beginning in the 1980s, there was a significant increase in awareness of the deep flaws of mainstream journalism among those on the U.S. left. Writers such as Todd Gitlin, Herbert Schiller, Gaye Tuchman, Ben Bagdikian, and Michael Parenti, each in his or her own way, drew attention to the incompatibility between a corporate run news media and an ostensibly democratic society. The work of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in particular, introduced an entire generation of progressives to a critical position regarding mainstream journalism. As the title of their masterful Manufacturing Consent indicated, the capitalist news media are far more about generating support for elite policies than they are about empowering people to make informed political decisions.

What is not so well known across the left, not to mention elsewhere, is that this radical criticism of the limitations of a capitalist sponsored journalism is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it dates back to the birth, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of both modern monopoly capitalism and modern commercial media, roughly one hundred years ago. Radical criticism of the press was an integral component of the many large social movements of the Progressive Era, which sought to resist the effects of accelerating capitalist development. It was a time of striking similarity to the present, mirroring in particular the corruption of democracy by political and economic elites whose control over the media strangles public awareness, debate, and activism. However, unlike today, radical criticism of capitalist journalism was a dominant theme on the left during the Progressive Era, particularly in the socialist, anarchist, and progressive press. This was the Golden Age of radical press criticism, and Upton Sinclair was at its epicenter.

Upton Sinclair is best remembered for his novel The Jungle, the 1906 muckraking exposé of labor and sanitary conditions in the Chicago stockyards. The book catapulted the then-twenty-seven-year-old author into international prominence, and Sinclair remained a highly acclaimed and widely read author until his death in 1968. What has been forgotten is that, although he wrote ninety-two books and twenty-nine pamphlets, for much of Sinclair's career he was known as a "two book author." The other book, besides The Jungle, was The Brass Check, which he published himself in 1919. In The Brass Check, Sinclair made a systematic and damning critique of the severe limitations of the "free press" in the United States. "(T)he thesis of this book," he wrote, is "that American Journalism is a class institution serving the rich and spurning the poor."*If The Jungle was notorious for its aggressive assaults on capitalist industry, The Brass Check pulled even fewer punches. The title itself is a reference to the chit issued to patrons of urban brothels at the time. Sinclair drew an analogy between journalists and prostitutes, beholden to the agenda, ideology, and policies of the monied elites that owned and controlled the press. It was an integral part of his broader critique of the corruption of U.S. politics and the appalling nature of capitalism: "Politics, Journalism, and Big Business work hand in hand for the hoodwinking of the public and the plundering of labor" (p. 153).

With the ostensible voice of the public in the hands of the editors and news writers of the capitalist press, Sinclair saw that he and the movements for social justice could never expect a fair deal. The very public opinion which the socialists sought to mobilize against the social order was wielded not by the democratic polity but by the elites who ruled them. So long as this situation continued, there could be no justice. The press was the key to every political issue in isolation and essential to the success of the larger movement as a whole. By the time Sinclair sat down in 1919 to write The Brass Check, he did so knowing that this book was of far greater significance than any he had written before. In the text of the book itself, he called it "the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written"(p. 429).

Yet while The Jungle remains a staple of American literature, The Brass Check has been all but forgotten. This is the case despite its groundbreaking critique of the structural basis of U.S. journalism, arguably the first such systematic critique ever made. Anticipating much of the best in more recent structural media criticism, Sinclair explained the class bias built into journalism in a four-part systemic model emphasizing the importance of owners, advertisers, public relations, and the web of economic interests tied into the media system, and invested in its control of public opinion. Integrating the critique of the press into the larger history of Progressive Era activism, Sinclair pointed to the centrality of the media in all of the problems of social injustice which attended the rise of modern capitalism.

Yet, those historians who bother to mention The Brass Check dismiss it as ephemeral, explaining that the problems it depicts have been solved. As John Ahouse, Sinclair's bibliographer put it, the criticism made by Sinclair in " The Brass Check played an important part by provoking and broadening a debate that eventually led to greater objectivity in the American press."* Sinclair, the curmudgeonly muckraker, helped clean up the newsrooms much like he helped clean up the stockyards. We can all move on to some other more pressing social issue.

In fact, many of the concerns Sinclair had about commercial journalism did not disappear with the rise of professionalism and "objectivity"-a development he witnessed and regarded with disdain as a sham solution. Moreover, as commercial pressures on the integrity of U.S. journalism have intensified over the past two decades, much of Sinclair's critique now appears startlingly accurate. What then explains the erasure of The Brass Check, not to mention the entire radical tradition it crystallizes, from public consciousness, or even from the reading lists of contemporary media scholars, both mainstream and critical?

In our view, the explanation is that in this book Sinclair analyzes a central and powerful institution in the United States-the commercial press-and offers an unambiguously radical critique. The fact that attacking the press system was considerably more sensitive, difficult, and controversial than criticizing meatpackers or robber barons was quickly and immediately apparent to Sinclair.

From the outset, The Brass Check faced an opposition unlike any other book he published. For starters, each of the first two hundred pages contained the potential for a libel suit. He could not even find a commercial book publisher willing to tackle the project, so he self-published the book, something he did on only a few other occasions in his career. And the book was hardly lacking in commercial promise. Sinclair organized ten printings of The Brass Check in its first decade and sold over 150,000 copies. He did not even copyright the book, hoping to maximize his readership, but also knowing that no one was likely to reprint it and join him in the hot seat. Indeed, at one point, he had difficulties securing sufficient paper from recalcitrant vendors to reprint the book.*

Nor did the hostility of the established media powers end there. Most newspapers refused to review the book, and those very few that did were almost always unsympathetic. Many newspapers, like the New York Times, even refused to run paid advertisements for the book (p. 294). Critics loosely charged that Sinclair had been sloppy with his facts in The Brass Check, and the book did not stand up to close scrutiny. Sinclair, a fanatic for factual accuracy, directly challenged any of those he criticized in The Brass Check to sue him for criminal libel-often in the footnotes of later editions of the book-if they could prove a single word in the text was false. No suits were ever forthcoming. Indeed, in 1921, the Associated Press announced it was appointing a commission to review, collect evidence, and denounce the charges Sinclair made about the AP in The Brass Check. The project was quietly abandoned without any report, formal or informal, being issued (p. 376).

In our view it was this smear campaign, more than anything else, which led to the virtual disappearance of The Brass Check by the middle of the century. Sinclair was effectively powerless to reply in the mainstream media, so unanswered charges and innuendos assumed the aura of truth. Sinclair himself moved on to other pressing matters. His media criticism was always part of a broader commitment to social justice, and in the 1920s and 1930s there were numerous causes to engage his attention.

That it was Upton Sinclair who spearheaded the attack on the capitalist press was no small matter. During much of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, Sinclair was a public figure of the highest magnitude, something of no small accomplishment for an avowed socialist. H. L. Mencken asserted that Sinclair was, "by far," the most widely translated American author abroad. In 1941, George Bernard Shaw told Sinclair, "When people ask me what has happened in my lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files or to the authorities, but to your novels." As Greg Mitchell puts it, "No American writer converted more young people to socialism."*

But he was also much more than a writer. Sinclair was directly involved in social experiments, like group-living cooperatives, and he had a keen interest in health food. Most important, he ran for public office on several occasions, usually as a Socialist. He was never effectively a party politician tied to specific ideologues or doctrines-but he was never far from the action. His greatest success came in 1934 when he ran as the Democratic candidate for Governor of California on his End Poverty in California (EPIC) platform. In the words of the New York Times, it was "the first serious movement against the profit system in the United States." As Greg Mitchell has brilliantly chronicled, Sinclair was defeated after an extraordinary war of sophisticated propaganda conducted by the state's wealthy elite, including the leading Hollywood moguls and the news media.* The brass check, indeed!

As talented as Sinclair was, and as remarkable as his career was, he is best understood not as some exceptional genius, but, rather, as representative of broad developments in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. This was especially true of the media criticism Sinclair provided in The Brass Check. The crisis of the press Sinclair wrote about was commonly discussed all across American society during the Progressive Era. The basis for the crisis was fairly clear. Traditionally, newspapers in the United States had been highly partisan. The views represented in the pages were those of the owner; the editor and publisher were indeed one. A major city might have ten to twenty daily newspapers, or more, each representing a distinct political viewpoint. No single paper dominated the market, and if someone was dissatisfied with the existing range of viewpoints, it was not impossible to launch a new newspaper. The market was relatively competitive.

All of that changed by the end of the nineteenth century as newspaper markets became vastly less competitive. The largest newspaper magnates-Pulitzer, Hearst, Scripps-had constructed "chains" of newspapers across the country which often accounted for one of the two newspapers in a given market if it did not hold an outright monopoly. Moreover, what economists call "barriers to entry" made it much more difficult for new entrepreneurs to found competitors. Advertising became the largest source of revenues; it rose from relative insignificance in the mid-nineteenth century to accounting for some two-thirds of newspaper income by the beginning of the twentieth century. This greatly enhanced the concentration process. Advertisers tended to flock to the paper or papers that offered the most readers at the lowest "cost per thousand." This tended to drive marginal papers out of business, strengthening the monopolies of wealthy owners or chains in all but the largest cities. Despite the immense profitability of daily newspapers in the United States throughout the twentieth century, no more than a few upstart newspapers have successfully entered established markets since 1920. This is a classic indicator of monopoly, or, at least, oligopoly. Newspaper publishing was a big business.

This concentration in newspaper markets, along with the rise of advertising, was the foundation for the crisis of journalism in the Progressive Era. It was one thing to have stridently partisan journalism when there were numerous papers in a community offering a range of viewpoints, and it was not that difficult to launch a new one. It was quite another matter to have stridently partisan journalism when there were only one or two newspapers, and they clearly represented the politics of their owners, which were usually decidedly conservative. Journalism in such a context has the scent not unlike that of official propaganda in an authoritarian society where there are formal restrictions on press freedom. This was the context that Sinclair was addressing.

Conventional accounts of the crisis of journalism in the Progressive Era, including the most frequently cited history by Frank Luther Mott and the most thorough study by Marion Marzolf, have tended to emphasize the increase in sensational fare-or what was termed "yellow journalism"-as profit-hungry publishers published whatever was necessary to attract the mass readership that would win over advertisers.* The hallowed obligation of the democratic press accurately to report public affairs was brushed aside by a wave of new gimmicky features, trumpeting the lies of elite interests who used their papers to manipulate national politics. Progressives encamped with Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin frequently flayed the commercial press in the pages of La Follette's Magazine, warning of the perversion of democratic processes through the manufacture of public opinion.

Universities organized conferences to address the problems of degraded public information, manipulation of prejudice, and the agenda setting by the web of vested interests behind the commercial press system. Editors and journalists within the system expressed their own concerns, advocating the endowment of a noncommercial press, the creation of fairness and accuracy bureaus, and the restriction of advertising revenues. Between 1900 and 1920, hundreds upon hundreds of critical articles were printed in the popular press, from socialist newspapers to mass circulation magazines.

At the root of this almost universal opposition were some very simple concerns. "If the country is governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the newspapers," Harvard professor Hugo Munsterberg wrote in 1911, "is it not essential to understand who governs the newspapers?" The power of the press was axiomatic. "The American press has more influence than it ever had in any other time, in any other country," Will Irwin wrote in 1911. "No other extrajudicial form except religion, is half so powerful." Charles Edward Russell expressed the sentiments of many, when he wrote for La Follette's political magazine in 1910: "If the people of the entire United States could be informed every day of exactly what happens at Washington and the reason for it, the peculiar stranglehold that the corporations have upon national legislation would last no longer than the next election."*

If the conventional accounts saw the problem with journalism as commercialism out of control, with everyone the loser, the radical press critics saw it in stark class terms. "A subservient press and a free government cannot abide under the same roof," Max Sherover wrote in a socialist political pamphlet. And the subservience was to big business. Liberal editor Hamilton Holt, though a far cry politically from socialism, quoted a journalist off-the-record to make a very similar point: "The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes." La Follette was a constant critic of the press system. In a speech to a convention of magazine publishers in Philadelphia, in February 1912, he warned of the dangerous forces at work in the press: "The control comes through the community of interests, that interdependence of investments and credits which ties the publishers up to the banks, the advertisers, the special interests."*

Although the radical criticism was laced with anger at editors and reporters who failed to tell the truth, this was never a conspiracy theory. The premise was never that the problem was bad people; to the contrary, the problem was that it was a bad system that forced good and bad people to do bad things. The central logic of capitalist news production corrupted its democratic purpose to the very core. "It cannot be denied," one socialist wrote, "that the financing of large-scale newspapers and magazine enterprises depends, with but few exceptions, on the good will of the business community. And this goodwill cannot be had without serving the interest of the business community." One editor of the Boston Common argued: "It is not accident nor the special depravity of publishers but the cold logic of commercial necessity which brings into being the fact that in most of the great battles against special privilege the big newspapers are found openly or stealthily lined up on the side of privilege." Industry proposals for internal reform smacked of futility. Professor Edward Ross of the University of Wisconsin advocated the notion of an endowed press with these sentiments: "To urge the editor, under the thumb of the advertiser or of the owner, to be more independent, is to invite him to remove himself from his profession. As for the capitalist-owner, to exhort him to run his newspaper in the interest of truth and progress is about as reasonable as to exhort the mill-owner to work his property for the public good instead of for his private benefit."*

In this radical press criticism, advertising was regarded as a particularly negative force and the primary instrument of corruption. "When the news-columns and editorial page are a mere incident in the profitable sale of mercantile publicity, it is strictly 'businesslike' to let the big advertisers censor both," Professor Ross wrote in 1910. La Follette termed advertising "a subtle new peril," and he informed journalists that it would "in time seek to gag you." "It is the big advertiser," William Salisbury, a prominent journalist, concluded, "who is the gold-sceptered king of American journalism-the king who can do no wrong."*

Sinclair, too, more than any previous press critic, zeroes in on advertising and its ignominious implications for a free press. "Everywhere in the world of Journalism, high and low, you see this power of the advertiser," he writes. "This system of publicity in return for advertising is a fundamentally dishonest one, but it is inseparable from the business of publishing news for profit, and the legitimate and the illegitimate shade into one another so gradually that it would be hard for an honest editor to know where to draw the line"(p. 285). Moreover, to Sinclair, the political biases of advertisers made it vastly more difficult for socialist pro-labor publications to survive in the marketplace. "For some strange reason," he noted of a magazine that generated a large circulation but still could not generate enough revenue to break even, "the packers of hams and bacon, the manufacturers of automobiles and ready-made clothing, of toilet perfumeries and fancy cigarettes, would not pay money to a Socialist magazine!" (p. 294)

Sinclair's genius in The Brass Check is, in part, to sift through much of this entire body of criticism and distill it into a coherent monograph. Combined with his own extensive experience as a journalist and political activist, it makes for a heady brew. There is, for example, the rudimentary basis of a sophisticated critique of the use of propaganda by powerful forces to subvert democracy: "Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two parties of their exploiters" (p. 222). "You will miss the point of this book," Sinclair writes later, "if you fail to get clear the perversion of news and the betrayal of public opinion is no haphazard and accidental thing; for twenty five years...it has been a thing deliberately planned and systematically carried out, a science and a technique. High-priced experts devote their lives to it, they sit in counsel with the masters of industry, and report on the public minds, and determine precisely how this shall be presented, and how this shall be suppressed" (p. 262).

The scope of the opposition is testament to the depth of the crisis in the press. The Progressive Era was awash in progressive, independent media. Members and supporters of the Socialist Party alone published some 325 English and foreign language daily, weekly, and monthly newspapers and magazines. Most of these were privately owned or were the publications of one of the five thousand Socialist Party locals. They reached a total of more than two million subscribers. Appeal to Reason, the legendary socialist weekly in which Sinclair had his own page, had a readership of more than 750,000 alone. But the monopolistic, advertising-supported media marketplace elevated the degree of difficulty for the alternative press such that it was virtually impossible to become "mainstream." Sinclair had contempt for the idea that radicals should content themselves with financially insolvent media on the margins, dismissing that notion as a clear indication that "bourgeois thought is bankrupt" (p. 404).

For Sinclair, it is the treatment of movements for social justice that is the real measure of journalism in his era, and it is here that he found the treatment of labor, socialists, and feminists so unsympathetic and hostile, that it became an enormous barrier to the peaceful exercise of democracy. "Journalism follows this simple and elemental rule," he writes, "if strikers are violent, they get on the wires, while if strikers are not violent, they stay off the wires; by which simple device it is brought about that nine-tenths of the telegraphic news you read about strikes is news of violence, and so in your brain channels is irrevocably graven the idea-association: Strikes-violence! Violence-strikes!"(p. 353)

The point of The Brass Check is not merely to criticize commercial journalism, but to explain the reasons so the system may be changed. "The thing I am interested in saying is: The Prostitution of journalism is due to such and such factors, and may be remedied by such and such changes" (p. 221). Although a socialist, Sinclair was loathe to have a government monopoly over newspapers or journalism. He presents a range of solutions in The Brass Check, including several that would work within the system. He called, for example, for powerful independent unions of journalists. "In every newspaper-office in America the same struggle between the business-office and the news-department is going on all the time" (p. 234). "One purpose of this book," he concluded, "is to advocate a union of newspaper workers, so that they may make their demands as an organization, and not as helpless individuals" (p. 421). He also urged organized labor to establish well-funded independent newspapers. For several years after the publication of The Brass Check, Sinclair collected money pledges to launch "an honest weekly newspaper entitled the 'National News,' serving no party or cause, but giving the facts to the people. Sinclair abandoned the newspaper idea when it became a drain on his time; he preferred to write books (p. 440).

Sinclair is to be commended for his willingness to offer plans for reform in addition to providing a critique of the status quo. That his solutions did not measure up to his critique is another example of the supreme difficulties that have faced radical media critics. "The American people thoroughly despise and hate their newspapers," Sinclair observed, "yet they seem to have no idea what to do about it, and take it for granted that they must go on reading falsehoods for the balance of their days"(p. 201). The commercial news media were an especially strong adversary, with their domination over the dissemination of ideas and their influence over politicians. Those politicians that dared attack the press barons, like Robert M. La Follette, earned powerful enemies who would then work to undermine their political careers and agendas (pp. 325-26). Whatever success media reform would enjoy at the time of The Brass Check would depend largely on the success of the Socialists and the La Follette branch of the progressive movement. When those movements were crushed, by the 1920s, the prospects for media reform, dim to begin with, disappeared with but a handful of exceptions.*

It is ironic that observers at the time argued that the rise of professionalism effectively resolved Sinclair's main criticism of the news media. Though the notion of professional journalism was introduced in the Progressive Era, it resolved very little at the time-hardly surprising since it has never served as more than a rhetorical stand-in for its supposed accomplishments despite becoming internalized as a rule by the mid-twentieth century. Even if it could be credibly developed, the revolutionary idea that the political views of the news media would not automatically reflect those of the owner began as just that, an idea. The much ballyhooed construction of the "Chinese Wall" that would separate the business office from the editorial office would take time to reinforce. The trained professionals who would refuse the biases of the ownership and sublimate their own partisanship had yet to be trained to do so. Moreover, it was a major obstacle to the legitimacy of the practice that this was an informal agreement, made by the owners because it legitimated their product in the face of more concentrated ownership and was therefore very good business. Nonetheless, for most establishment observers, then and subsequently, professionalism in the Progressive Era was the perfect solution, and it worked.

But Sinclair was anything but a mainstream observer, and enough of a socialist to think any solution that left the power in the hands of the owning class was invariably flawed. He believed that, ultimately, those who own, and hire, and fire, and set budgets determine the values of the medium. Quoting Will Irwin, he noted that the "subordinates" drift "inevitably toward the point of view held by their master" (p. 276). "A professional journalist," he concludes, "may be defined as a man who holds himself ready at a day's notice to adjust his opinions to the pocket-book of a new owner"(p. 248).*There were plenty of disillusioned journalists floating around to confirm the sentiment. Professionalism lowered the menace of commercial journalism just below the threshold of public outrage and held it there with a combination of mild internal reform and stunningly comprehensive public relations to compensate for the ever-present reality of business as usual. Will Irwin captured this duality vividly. "Publicly, the controlled newspaper assumes to exercise its ancient office of tribune of the people. Privately, it serves wealth. Publicly, that it may keep its subscribers, it pretends to favor progress; privately that it may guard its owners sources of revenue and social position, it suppresses and denatures the news which would assist that process. The system is dishonest to its marrow."*

In the decades since The Brass Check was first published, professionalism in journalism has become far more sophisticated. It has provided a measure of autonomy for journalists from commercial pressures, and it has placed a premium upon factual accuracy. That is all to the good. But professional journalism's basic claims of fairness and social neutrality have come under sustained criticism, and there is ample evidence to justify Sinclair's skepticism. To be blunt, the newly minted code for professional journalists had, as media critic Ben Bagdikian points out, several distinct biases written into it that reflected the commercial and political needs of the owners. (For a discussion of these, see Robert W. McChesney, " Journalism, Democracy, and Class Struggle," Monthly Review, November 2000.)

The bogus neutrality of professional journalism is evident in the manner in which it tends to cover anti-capitalist social movements. In professional journalism, business is assumed to be the natural steward of society, while labor is seen as a less benevolent force and left politics generally are held in suspicion. A cartoon from the late 1940s in the CIO News captured progressive sentiment toward this trend in the news media. It showed the cigar-smoking fat boss caricature manipulating two levers connected to a skull cap fitted over the head of a person identified as the American public. One lever is for radio, the other for newspapers. The message being pumped into the head is "business is good, labor is bad."

During the past twenty-five years, it has gotten even more difficult for progressives to receive satisfactory press coverage in the mainstream media. This is due primarily to the tightening corporate ownership over the news media that has resulted from government deregulation of broadcasting and lax enforcement of antitrust statutes. Over the past two decades, the U.S. media system has been consolidated in the hands of a small number of colossal conglomerates. To give some sense of proportion, in 2000 AOL purchased Time Warner in the biggest media deal ever, valued at around $160 billion. That was 470 times greater than the value of the largest media deal in history that had been recorded by 1979. The nine or ten largest media conglomerates now almost all rank among the three hundred largest firms in the world; in 1970 there were only a couple of media firms on that list.

These media conglomerates often pay a premium price for TV networks or newspaper chains, so they have huge incentive to apply the same commercial logic to their newsrooms that they apply to their other divisions. Why should they grant editors carte blanche when their other managers are held to a strict accounting of all their moves? The logical result has been a reduction in resources for journalism, a decline in costly and controversial investigative reporting, and a softening up of journalistic standards to permit less expensive and more commercially attractive journalism. First in line for the corporate guillotine was international reporting which costs a great deal of money and adds little to the bottom line. Labor coverage has fallen off the map, while more lucrative "business journalism"-pitched to the top quarter of the population, if that-has become so widespread that it has effectively merged with general news. This tendency for business journalism to become the defining modality for journalism generally effectively established and celebrated the triumph of "market forces" as the beneficent guiding light of American democracy and public affairs-a boldly ideological move couched in the trappings of disinterested reportage.

In short, the media owners have increasingly abandoned the professional "deal," because it no longer makes economic sense. One measure of the attack on the autonomy of the newsroom can be found in the plummeting morale of working journalists. Well into the 1980s, journalists were among the staunchest and most sensitive defenders of the media status quo. They enjoyed their privileges and were convinced that they used them for the betterment of society. Over the past decade, in what amounts to a sea change, journalists have grown despondent over the collapse of their autonomy. The Pew Center surveys of journalists showed a marked increase in demoralization over the course of the 1990s. The editor of the Chicago Tribune, James Squires, left his job, arguing that he had witnessed the "death of journalism" due to the "corporate takeover" of the news.*

So the dawn of the twenty-first century finds us in a position not entirely unlike the one found by Sinclair and his compatriots eighty plus years ago. The media are exceptionally concentrated, the journalism is of dubious integrity, journalists are demoralized, and the political system is awash in corruption. Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check is not only the capstone of the first great generation of modern press criticism, but is also the first thoroughgoing critique of the modern era of capitalist journalism, an era in which we most certainly remain. The political crisis of capitalist journalism remains an unavoidable and central facet in understanding our current predicament, and there is no reason to think the problem will go away of its own volition. Any democratic reckoning will have to come to terms with the core problems that capitalist control over journalism and media pose for a free and self-governing society.

* Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check, 9th rev. ed. (Long Beach Cal.: The Author, 1928), 147. All page number references included in the text of this article are to this edition of Sinclair's book.

* John Ahouse, Upton Sinclair: A Descriptive, Annotated Bibliography (Los Angeles: Mercer & Aitchison, 1994), 42.

* Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), 177–178

* All of these quotations are taken from Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Modern Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), x-xvi.

* See Mitchell, op. cit., for his detailed analysis of the 1934 race, as well as the material in this paragraph. See also, Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, with an introduction by James Gregory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Originally published in 1934 and 1935.

* See Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, rev. ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1950), 519; Marion Marzolf, Civilizing Voices: American Press Criticism, 1880–1950 (New York: Longman, 1991)

* Hugo Munsterberg, "The Case of the Reporter," McClure's, February 1911, 435–439; Will Irwin, The American Newspaper: A Series First Appearing in Collier's, January–July, 1911 (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1969), 8; Charles Edward Russell, "The Press and the Public," La Follette's Magazine, June 4, 1910, 7–8.

*Max Sherover, Fakes in American Journalism, 3rd ed. (Brooklyn: Free Press League, 1916), 7; Hamilton Holt, Commercialism in Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 3-4; Robert La Follette, La Follette's Autobiography, 258-259.

* S.E. "The 'Free Speech' Fallacy," The Socialist Review, April 1920, 273; Livy S. Richard quoted in "Our Problem of the Press," La Follette's Magazine, July 20, 1912, 15; Edward Alsworth Ross, "The Suppression of Important News," Atlantic Monthly, March 1910, 310.

* Ross, "Suppression," 304; Robert La Follette, La Follette's Autobiography, 259; William Salisbury, The Career of a Journalist (New York: B. W. Dodge, 1908), 523.

* One of those exceptions was the movement to establish a significant nonprofit and noncommercial component to U.S. radio broadcasting in the early 1930s. See Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

* A striking example of this is television journalist Ted Koppel's response to Disney's plan to replace Koppel's highly successful news-interview show Nightline on ABC (owned by Disney) with the David Letterman comedy-entertainment show, if Disney could lure the comedian from CBS. According to Koppel, "It is perfectly understandable that Disney would jump at the opportunity to increase earnings." Koppel quoted in William Safire, New York Times, Op-Ed, March 7, 2002.

* James Squires, Read All About It! (New York: Times Books, 1993).

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Upton Sinclair and the Contradictions of Capitalist Journalism | Ben Scott | Monthly Review

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Beginning in the 1980s, there was a significant increase in awareness of the deep flaws of mainstream journalism among those on the U.S. left. Writers such as Todd Gitlin, Herbert Schiller, Gaye Tuchman, Ben Bagdikian, and Michael Parenti, each in his or her own way, drew attention to the incompatibility between a corporate run news media and an ostensibly democratic society.

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Nellie Bly, pseudonym of Elizabeth Cochrane, also spelled Cochran, (born May 5, 1864, Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died January 27, 1922, New York, New York), American journalist whose around-the-world race against a fictional record brought her world renown. Elizabeth Cochran (she later add…

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Nellie Bly was an American journalist known for her pioneering reporting, including her 1887 expose on the conditions of asylum patients at Blackwell's Island in New York City and her trip around the world in 1889.