author
Charles E. Chapin
1858–1930
A hard-driving newspaper editor who helped define big-city journalism, he spent years shaping Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening World into one of New York’s most talked-about papers. His life later took a startling turn, ending in prison, where he wrote an unusually candid memoir.
1 Audiobook
Charles Chapin's story : Written in Sing Sing Prison
by Charles E. Chapin
About the author
Born in Watertown, New York, in 1858, Charles E. Chapin went into newspaper work young and built a reputation as a relentless, highly effective editor. He became city editor of Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening World in New York, where he was known for discipline, speed, and a fierce instinct for news that helped make the paper a powerhouse of its era.
Chapin was one of the most colorful figures of American journalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Accounts of his career often describe him as brilliant, demanding, and feared in the newsroom, a man who pushed reporters hard and helped shape the fast, vivid style of metropolitan reporting that readers came to expect.
His story is also marked by tragedy. In 1918 he was convicted of killing his wife and was sent to Sing Sing prison. There he wrote Charles E. Chapin's Story, a memoir that has kept interest in his life alive, not only as a record of newspaper history but also as the personal testimony of a famous editor brought low.