Joseph Pulitzer

Pulitzer crossed the Atlantic in 1864 as a substitute recruit for a Union Army veteran, having been rejected by Austrian, French, and British militaries on account of his eyesight. After the Civil War he settled in St. Louis, learned English, became a U.S. citizen, and bought the bankrupt St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1878. In 1883 he bought the New York World from Jay Gould and turned it into the largest-circulation newspaper in the country. His circulation war with William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal in the 1890s gave the language the term "yellow journalism" — and a body of practice the American press has been arguing about ever since. The endowment in his will established the Pulitzer Prizes, awarded annually by Columbia University since 1917.