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Hungarian Mosaic
Joseph Pulitzer
When an American journalist wakes up in the middle of the night with a happy, wide smile on his face, it means that he had a very pleasant dream.
Well, what could be so great a dream about? He probably dreamt that he won the Pulitzer Prize and Joseph Pulitzer personally handed it over to him with a nice speech – in Hungarian! The founder of the most distinguished Pulitzer Prize was a Hungarian, born April 10th, 1847, in Makó, southern Hungary.
At the age of 17, Pulitzer left for Hamburg, Germany, where he was recruited by Lincoln’s representatives, and this man who later in his life gave millions of dollars away, arrived on the shores of the United States without a penny in his pocket. First he fought in the Union army during the Civil War, then settled in St. Louis, and at the age of 20 became an American citizen. He worked as a news reporter and, with a good sense of business, bought a newspaper that finally became the „St. Louis Post-Dispatch”. Always crusading for the public interest, the Post-Dispatch in a short time became one of the most influential papers in America.
In 1883, Pulitzer bought out the „New York World”, and moved his headquarters to the metropolis. In his new paper, he fought gangsters and crooked financiers. He also raised the then extremely huge sum of 100,000 dollars to erect the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. The public liked him, and with the public’s support, Pulitzer founded two more papers. When Pulitzer was 43 years old, he built a 22-story home for his papers, but his sudden blindness prevented him from seeing the golden dome topping the building.
In 1903, he founded the Pulitzer Prizes and financed the creation of the Columbia School of Journalism. This School opened in 1912, one year after Joseph Pulitzer died, at the age of 64.
There are 14 Pulitzer Prizes in three categories: journalism, literature and music, and they are given out on the first Monday in May. Here is a little sampling of the American fiction book writers who were awarded a Pulitzer Prize: Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Margaret Mitchell for the novel „Gone with the Wind”, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, James Mitchener, and so on.
A young man had to come from Hungary to give American journalists, writers and musicians a dream worth working for.
This is Claudia Margittay-Balogh, putting this American chip into the Great Hungarian Mosaic.
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