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Today, seventy-three years after his death, journalists still tell tales of Charles E. Chapin. As city editor of Pulitzer’s New York Evening World , Chapin was the model of the take-no-prisoners newsroom tyrant: he drove reporters relentlessly—and kept his paper in the center ring of the circus of big-city journalism. From the Harry K. Thaw trial to the sinking of the Titanic , Chapin set the pace for the evening press, the CNN of the pre-electronic world of journalism.
In 1918, at the pinnacle of fame, Chapin’s world collapsed. Facing financial ruin, sunk in depression, he decided to kill himself and his beloved wife Nellie. On a quiet September morning, he took not his own life, but Nellie’s, shooting her as she slept. After his trial—and one hell of a story for the World’s competitors—he was sentenced to life in the infamous Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York.
In this story of an extraordinary life set in the most thrilling epoch of American journalism, James McGrath Morris tracks Chapin’s rise from legendary Chicago street reporter to celebrity powerbroker in media-mad New York. His was a human tragedy played out in the sensational stories of tabloids and broadsheets. But it’s also an epic of redemption: in prison, Chapin started a newspaper to fight for prisoner rights, wrote a best-selling autobiography, had two long-distance love affairs, and tapped his prodigious talents to transform barren prison plots into world-famous rose gardens before dying peacefully in his cell in 1930.
The first portrait of one of the founding figures of modern American journalism, and a vibrant chronicle of the cutthroat culture of scoops and scandals, The Rose Man of Sing Sing is also a hidden history of New York at its most colorful and passionate.
James McGrath Morris is a former journalist, author of Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars , and a historian. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia, and teaches at West Springfield High School.
The author of Jailhouse Journalism tells extraordinary true story of legendary newspaper editor Charles E. Chapin...
The reader is actually getting two books in one reading...The first 'book' is about one of the greatest and meanest city editors, Charles Chapin, a spendthrift who erred by killing his wife instead of himself. The second tale is about his life as a rose grower in Sing Sing, the well-know prison, his editing of the prison newspaper and two long-distance love affairs.
…a damned good story in any era.
Chapin's story is engagingly told by James McGrath Morris.
James McGrath Morris' well-researched narrative has the pace and detail of an engrossing historical novel.
'Rose Man' is the story of an individual not only possessing a strong grasp on what was needed to attract readers in the heyday of stiff competiton among dailies, but one able to personally produce.
...recounts the life of Charles E. Chapin, a founding figure of modern journalism who killed his wife and died in prison.
Chapin's life, that of a brilliant and limited man who eventually found horticultural redemption, is almost operatic in its sweep, and makes an unforgettable story.
In a book that reads more like a novel than the first biography of one of the legendary figures of newspaper journalism history, James McGrath Morris has done a laudable job of capturing the essence of Charles Chapin.