Ebook Imperial Hearst

Ferdinand Lundberg was born in Chicago in 1902 of Norwegian and Swedish parentage, and was educated in the public schools there, in Crane College, Chicago, Ill., New York University and Columbia University. He began newspaper work in 1924 as a "leg man" on the Chicago Journal, published by John Eastman, who had been Hearst's first business manager in Chicago. He learned something of the Hearst method from his work on the Journal and the necessity to compete with reporters on the Hearst papers. Later he was assigned to the State's Attorney's office during the heyday of Capone, O'Bannion and other Chicago gang leaders, working in the newspaper milieu depicted by Hecht and MacArthur in The Front Page.

In 1926 Mr. Lundberg left what he calls "this turmoil" to join the staff of the United Press and was transferred to New York in April of 1927. He covered the take-offs of Lindbergh, Byrd and Chamberlain. Toward the end of 1927 he joined the Wall Street staff of the New York Herald Tribune. He was covering the Stock Exchange during the crash of 1929 and wrote all the front-page stories of that debacle, and attended all of the "emergency" banker-press conferences throughout 1931-33. In June of 1934 he resigned from the Herald Tribune.

Mr. Lundberg began a thorough research into the career of Hearst. To support himself he wrote magazine articles and did correspondence for several European publications. He was aided in his Hearst research by several well-known public men and by important organizations, some of which turned over private documents to him.