Morrill Goddard's reputation as an editor rests largely on his innovations in the relatively brief period when he helped the leading New York newspaper impresarios of the 1890s, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, create yellow journalism. Goddard's peculiar contribution to the sensational genre embraced bizarre pseudoscience, mildly risqué human interest features, and flamboyant, colorful graphics--the characteristics that came to be associated with the term Sunday supplement. Goddard spent his later career as a secure member of Hearst's high command, continuing to apply for forty years the formulas he had developed before the turn of the century.

Goddard almost obsessively avoided public attention. Late in life, he wrote to his college alumni magazine: "I have been most of my life printing facts and photos of famous and infamous persons, but it is my opinion that I do not belong in either category and thus do not qualify...