Now just short of his fiftieth birthday, Ken Whyte is probably lodged in your mind as an establishment editor and publisher; The Uncrowned King reminds you that the man can really write, however, and he uses this study of William Randolph Hearst to defy formal expectations as only a firebrand might. Mr. Whyte imagined this book as a study of the fierce New York newspaper wars of the 1890s, and for a scholar of publishing history the discussion of "yellow journalism" and the success of the New York Journal is at the heart of this book. But if that is its true subject, this book must rest uneasily atop a mountain of personal and professional information, and as its title suggest it seeks at some level to right the wrongs of Hearst biographers who have worked before many times much of this same material.
This is called "social history," but you could not blame Random House for marketing it as biography. For much of its early pages, it is. Mr. Whyte is tremendously skilled at bringing his subject and the last decades of the American nineteenth century alive. But it is in his critique of other works about Hearst that he is peerless. You need not have read before a single word about the media titan to follow how The Uncrowned King supplements and corrects the existing record. Mr. Whyte avoids the pitfalls of dwelling too long on Hearst's relationship with his mother, and with the showgirls who captivated his imagination, while still revealing the idiosyncrasies that make Hearst a great subject. But just as you settle in for what you think to be an overview of the man's life, Mr. Whyte expands the discussion to all of Newspaper Row, New York. Was that personal preamble necessary for this public story? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I was more troubled to see Mr. Whyte treat with almost equal emphasis the early life of Joseph Pulitzer, Hearst's rival. If this is life writing, we have "dual lives" before we have finished one-third of the book, and as important as all that is to establish context, the reader can only be left with divided loyalties. In some ways, this is the best way to approach the story of circulation numbers and single-copy prices, illustration sizes and numbers of editions. These topics are always rooted in personalities, never more so than in the fascinating analysis of how Newspaper Row covered presidential politics in the 1890s. I must admit that for me, though, the grand finale of the text, the extensive discussion of press coverage of (and more direct participation in) the Spanish-American War, left me a little cold. The issues are so removed from those of today, in some ways, in spite of the fact that American relations with Cuba have never been resolved, that I found it less compelling than McKinley out-polling Bryan. When Mr. Whyte here resolved the war, I found that I no longer expected to hear more about Hearst, and in fact The Uncrowned King provides scant attention to the last, say, half-century of Hearst's life.
Perhaps I was overwhelmed. After all, it is a significant achievement to have disinterred Hearst and dismantled the conventions of biography in the course of five hundred pages.
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