Biography
In the early twentieth century, William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) assembled the largest newspaper chain in America and used it to promote a sensational editorial style his critics dubbed “yellow journalism.” Initially a Progressive and supporter of Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” he later turned against FDR and labor unions to promote big business.
Introduced to Hearst through Joseph P. Kennedy, a mutual friend and fellow Democrat, Burns’s father served as Hearst’s personal attorney and became an executor of his estate. The Flemish tapestries that hang in the Ford Tower entrance to Burns Library are a gift of the Hearst Foundation.
Burns prized his books and sought to keep them in pristine condition. He avoided underlining, adding marginal notes, dog-earing pages, or even inscribing his name in them. Occasionally he inserted bookmarks to recall the bookstores where he bought them and track his reading. He also received books as gifts, like this 1952 autobiography of Hearst presented to him by the editor, Edmond Coblentz, a friend of Burns’s father.
William Randolph Hearst, William Randolph Hearst: A Portrait in His Own Words (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952). PN4874.H4A3 1952
