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On his way to Europe, Pulitzer visited his brother, who now lived in New York. Albert had become captivated by journalism. His choice of vocation did little to lessen the competition between the brothers. After landing a job on the Illinois Staats-Zeitung in 1869, Albert had become fluent in English by obsessively studying Dickens and Shakespeare and engaging anyone he could in conversation. Later, he set his sights on New York and on breaking out of German-language journalism. “Chicago has treated your dear Baruch very well indeed,” he wrote to their mother, using the Jewish name meaning “blessed,” “but he is going to try his fortune once more in New York. Don’t be alarmed. It is destiny.”

Albert arrived in New York in 1871 with no prospect of work. He rented a dark room on Bleecker Street for $1 a week and sustained himself with apples that cost a penny apiece. He began his quest for a job by knocking on doors along Park Row, home to the nation’s leading newspapers. James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, Greeley’s New York Tribune, and Charles Dana’s New York Sun, along with less-known papers such as the New York Times and the World, all plied their trade within earshot of one another. It was America’s Fleet Street.

Only twenty years old and with only brief experience at a German paper in Chicago, Albert audaciously applied to the Sun, the most successful newspaper in the nation. Established by Benjamin Henry Day in 1833, the Sun had launched a new style of journalism in antebellum America. Instead of reporting on international and national events of limited interest to the masses, it focused on city news, violence being its favorite topic, and presented this news in a highly readable, though sometimes flippant, style. In comparison with the stodgy journals favored by city’s elite, the Sun was a blast of fresh air. It was compact, always four pages long, and, as the nation’s first penny newspaper, it was cheap.

At the time Albert approached the Sun’s six-story building at Nassau and Frankfort streets, the paper was at the height of its fame and selling more than 100,000 copies a day. It had been bought three years earlier by Dana, who had been Greeley’s managing editor at the Tribune and was considered a genius among editors. Building on the paper’s original mission, Dana inspired and enforced a regime of tight, coherent, bright, lively writing intended to provide “a daily photograph of the whole world’s doings in the most luminous and lively manner,” as he put it in his first editorial. The paper was a pastiche or quilt of urban tales. It was an irresistible feast of information that won wide attention in an era of generally dull journalism.

Under Dana’s regime, the paper prospered even more, and its circulation rose to new, unheard-of heights. Whereas Joseph could only dream of working for Dana, Albert was not intimidated. He walked up the flight of stairs to the Sun’s newsroom and spoke to the night editor. The editor asked Albert how long he had worked for a city newspaper.

“Only a short time, sir,” Albert replied.

“That’s rather vague,” the editor said, adding, “You have a slight accent.”

“I shall not have the accent long, sir. And I write better than I speak.”

The editor decided to give Albert a test assignment, a rather difficult one intended to discourage the youth. Albert “made a Parisian bow and disappeared,” said the editor. But to his surprise, Albert returned with the story and won himself a trial period on the staff of what many considered the best-written paper in town. In fact, soon after Albert landed this job, a letter appeared in the Sun from one reader in St. Louis. “I read The Sun regularly,” Joseph Pulitzer wrote. “In my opinion it is the most piquant, entertaining, and, without exception, the best newspaper in the world.”

Albert rose rapidly in the ranks of city reporters. His big break came when he was assigned to cover the Halstead murder in Newark, the city’s first murder in four years. General O. S. “Pet” Halstead had been shot