“Capped with an 850,000-pound gilded dome, the four-story editorial enclave perched on top of the Pulitzer building reached higher into the sky than even the Statue of Liberty’s raised torch. When the sun struck the dome, it reflected a shimmering light that could be seen forty miles out at sea. The first sight of the New World for immigrants entering New York was not a building of commerce, banking, or industry. Rather, it was a temple of America’s new mass media.”

In the third year of the American Civil War, a group of wealthy Bostonians hatched a scheme to import young men from Europe to meet the city’s quota of fresh bodies to send to the war.

On August 29, 1864, a ship carrying 254 men of military age, all lured by promises of paid travel to America and a $100 bounty upon arrival, pulled into Boston harbor. Among the group was 17-year-old Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian Jew who would start life in America as a penniless soldier and — after ushering in a golden age of newspapers– die as one of its richest and most powerful men.

James McGrath Morris’s biographical epic “Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power” traces the life of the brilliant man whose name would come to be synonymous with journalistic greatness.

The creation of the Columbia University journalism school and the awards that bear his name were the final acts in a lifetime dedicated to building an “able, disinterested, public-spirited press.”

From his beginnings as a kid reporter at a German-language paper in St. Louis to his reign atop the influential New York World, Pulitzer viewed journalism as an inherently political enterprise.

A member of the Missouri General Assembly at 23 and a congressman at 37, Pulitzer made it clear that he had no intention of watching from the sidelines as a neutral observer.

Autonomy, rather than objectivity, dominated Pulitzer’s recipe for an enticing, independent newspaper. The paper was allowed to have opinions; Pulitzer just wanted them to be his own.

In his first World editorial, he wrote that his paper would be independent, but “it must not be indifferent or neutral on any question involving public interest.”

He used the power of the pen to rail against corruption, rally the masses to his causes – including a donation drive he spearheaded to help build the Statue of Liberty — and sling mud at his rivals. He saw himself not only as a businessman, but also a powerful actor in the grand democracy of his adopted country.

“I hate the idea of passing away only known as the proprietor of the paper,” Pulitzer wrote shortly before his death. “Not property but politics was my passion, and not politics even in a general, selfish sense, but politics in the sense of liberty and freedom and ideals of justice.”

His formula for bright, lucrative journalism was simple: every day, he wanted to print something that made people chatter “Did you see that in the World?”

Pulitzer’s sensationalism and boldness in pursuit of those he deemed “rascals” earned him a lifetime of battles.

“The most valuable and successful paper will generally be that which has the most enemies,” he boasted.

In 1870, a young Pulitzer shot a lobbyist in a Jefferson City hotel parlor during a feud over a series of accusatory articles that led the lobbyist to call him a “damned liar and a puppy.”

When a committee investigating charges of police corruption tried to hold a meeting behind closed doors in St. Louis, Pulitzer sent a reporter to an adjacent doctor’s office to listen through a sealed door that wasn’t quite soundproof. After Pulitzer published an account of the meeting under the gloating headline “A Post and Dispatch Reporter Defies Locks and Bars, Bricks and Mortar,” the committee summoned his editors for questioning and sent police to investigate the doctor’s office.

He clashed famously with publishing rival William Randolph Hearst in a race-to-the-bottom battle for New York City readers that gave rise to the term “yellow journalism.”

Though Pulitzer’s life is undoubtedly a success story, Morris presents a full picture of a man who struggled mightily in his family relationships and alienated many through his domineering approach to those who worked under him.

In 1877, Pulitzer realized it was becoming increasingly difficult to make out the words as he read his beloved paper. His discovery that his retinas were becoming detached, a condition that virtually condemned him to a life of near-blindness, set off a litany of other physical and mental health problems.

As one of his men described it, Pulitzer became a “giant intelligence eternally condemned to the darkest of dungeons, a caged eagle furiously belaboring the bars.”

The intrepid young man who flung doors open as a reporter in St. Louis eventually became a world-weary vagabond, constantly traversing the Atlantic as he shuffled from place to place in search of an inner peace.

Despite his personal turmoil, Pulitzer was an unyielding champion of journalism’s importance in a free society.

When his longtime nemesis Teddy Roosevelt tried to throw him in prison for printing allegations of corruption during the creation of the Panama Canal, Pulitzer mounted a vigorous defense of his paper and the fundamental right to question the government.

“Mr. Roosevelt is an episode. The World is an institution,” read one editorial. “Long after Mr. Roosevelt is dead, long after Mr. Pulitzer is dead, long after all the present editors of this paper are dead, the World will still go on as a great independent newspaper, unmuzzled, undaunted, and unterrorized.”

As recent events have shown, the newspaper era might also be just an episode. The Joseph Pulitzers of the 21st century, in all likelihood, will not be newspaper publishers.

While everyone is focused on what the future of journalism will look like, Morris’s book provides an illuminating look at how one tremendously driven man shaped its history.

Maybe there is a future for newspapers. Or perhaps Pulitzer was all-too-correct in saying, “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together.”