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By Root 2272 0

Franklin Street, not far from where Pulitzer roomed. Upon meeting Pulitzer, Strauss and his family were impressed. “We found him to be bright and highly educated, speaking German and French without an accent and very good English,” said Theo’s son Adalbert Strauss. The younger Strauss and Pulitzer were about the same age. “I was drawn to him,” said Strauss, “by his uniformly kind manner and great courtesy.” When meeting Strauss’s mother, Pulitzer would exclaim, “Ich küss die Hand gnädige Frau,” a characteristically Viennese expression from courtly etiquette. Visiting Pulitzer in his room, Strauss also learned about his new friend’s devotion to his own mother when Pulitzer showed the miniature portrait of his mother he had brought with him from Hungary.

Strauss was also a witness to Pulitzer’s strong will. One day, Pulitzer showed up at work late, explaining that he had hardly slept, on account of an aching molar. “When I asked him how he obtained relief,” said Strauss, “he informed me that he had heated an eightpenny nail red hot in the flame of a gas burner and inserted it into the cavity.”

With the steady pay from his job at the lumberyard, Pulitzer began to explore his new home. He discovered the Mercantile Library, one of the city’s gems. A vastly successful civic project, the library was created in 1846 as a stock corporation by a group of merchants who were inspired by the example of New York City’s Mercantile Library. Young single men, these merchants reasoned, lived primarily in boardinghouses with no parlors in which to entertain themselves when they were not working. A library could offer lectures, concerts, and classes for “mutual improvement,” then considered the path of social and economic elevation, a much better alternative to bars and other less virtuous haunts.

Pulitzer paid the $2 initiation fee and $3 annual dues and signed his name in the members’ ledger on July 18, 1866. He was one of 275 clerks who joined the library that year, many enticed by a discounted membership aimed at recruiting them. Housed in a three-story building at Fifth and Locust streets, the library held a large collection of books, carried newspapers from all over the country and abroad, and was open each day of the week from morning until late at night. Pulitzer spent every free moment he had at the Mercantile, often bringing a pair of apples for sustenance so as not to waste a moment leaving the library for a meal. In the elegant library’s main room, he had his choice of 27,000 books stored behind glass on shelving extending to the ceiling, with a small catwalk to reach the higher shelves. Sitting at one of the eight-sided desks, above which rested busts of important writers from the past, Pulitzer applied himself to polishing his rudimentary English.

He approached the task with marked diligence and persistence. For instance, to expand his vocabulary he studied synonyms for all the words he was learning—a habit he recalled later as “the wisest weakness I had as a youth in acquiring some deeper knowledge of the English language.” The librarian, who lived in a chamber off the reading room, did not entirely approve of Pulitzer’s quest to use the library to learn English, because he didn’t confine himself solely to books. In fact, Pulitzer badgered members in hopes of persuading, or in some cases provoking, them into conversation. To the librarian Pulitzer seemed “just a noisy and unruly young man who ignored the posted signs commanding silence.”

His hours in the library paid off. Not only did he polish his English, but Pulitzer came into contact with lawyers, newspapermen, politicians, and other leading figures. One group of men, in particular, exerted considerable influence on the atmosphere of the library. A few months before Pulitzer joined, a dozen or so men had created the St. Louis Philosophical Society under the leadership of Henry C. Brockmeyer, a Prussian Jew who was said to be a “midwestern Thoreau.”

His moniker stemmed from an episode during the previous decade, when he had spent two years in a backwoods Missouri cabin