The Chief
The Life of William Randolph Hearst
by David Nasaw
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Editions of The Chief
 |
ISBN |
Binding/Format Paperback |
Publisher Mariner Books |
Date 2001 |
Price $1.00 |
 Good |
Publisher Notes
Named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Business Week, and GQ, THE CHIEF: THE LIFE OF WILLIAM RANDLOPH HEARST is "an absorbing and ingeniously organized biography . . . of the most powerful publisher America has ever known" (New York Times Book Review). Drawing on papers and interviews that were previously unavailable, as well as on newly released documentation of interactions with such figures as Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, every president from Grover Cleveland to Franklin Roosevelt, and movie giants Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and Irving Thalberg, David Nasaw completes the picture of this colossal American "engagingly, lucidly and fair-mindedly" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.).
"Outstandingly researched, elegantly but not flamboyantly written, and fair in its conclusions about Hearst's astonishing career" (Wall Street Journal), THE CHIEF "must be regarded as the definitive study . . . It's hard to imagine a more complete rendering of Hearst's life" (Business Week).
Media Reviews
"David Nasaw's absorbing and ingeniously organized new biography might finally rescue Hearst from the curse of Kane."
Excerpt
He preferred to think of himself as sui generis and self-created, which in many ways he was. Only in his late seventies, when he began writing a daily column in his newspapers, did he remind his readers--and himself--that he was the son of a pioneer. In a column about the song "Oh Susannah," which he claimed his father had sung to him, Hearst recounted the hardships George Hearst had endured on his thousand-mile trek from Missouri to California in 1850. There was a pride in the telling and in the story. His father had been one of the lucky ones, one of the stronger ones. While others had "died of cholera or were drowned by the floods or were killed by the Indians [or] tarried by the wayside under crude crosses and little hasty heaps of stone," his father had stayed the course, braved "the difficulties and dangers" and "at length . . . reached California in safety."1
First Line
WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST did not speak often of his father.
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