Two features of Horace Greeley's life make him notable in the fields of communication and journalism. The first is his rise to publisher of one of the most powerful newspapers in the nineteenth century, the New York Tribune. The second is his career as a writer of editorials and lectures for the popular "lyceums" (i.e., lecture series that provided education to the public on a variety of topics).

In his autobiography, Recollections of a Busy Life (published four years before his death), Greeley recalled the misery of his family's chronic, debt-ridden existence when he was a child: "Hunger, cold, rags, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach, are disagreeable; but debt is infinitely worse than them all" (Greeley, 1868, p. 96). This statement characterizes the drive that turned a child from an impoverished farm family into one of the most influential newspaper editors of the nineteenth...