On Tuesday, October 28, 1924, while eating breakfast in his Park Avenue apartment, writer Irvin S. Cobb discovered an annoyance that accompanied fame. There in theNew York Times, for all to see, was the amount he had paid the federal government for its relatively new income tax. At least Cobb could take some comfort in the fact that he was not the only one whose tax payment had become public. In fact, for the past three days newspapers had entertained their readers by listing the tax payments made by the nation’s best-known citizens. That he was among those the...

Charles E. Chapin was born on October 29, 1858, in Oneida, a dozen miles from the geographical center of New York state. He was the second member of the second generation of his family to be born in Madison County, situated in the western end of the Leatherstocking region, so named because of the leather leggings worn by frontiersmen and made famous by James Fenimore Cooper’s fictitious Natty Bumppo. Oneida was then a growing, prosperous community, one of many in a string of towns that had come to life across the top of the Empire State since the 363-mile Erie...

Years later, Chapin would call it “a false step,” but in the spring of 1877 he became an actor. Rodney Guptill, an Elgin friend, invited Chapin to join an amateur dramatic club he was organizing. “I protested that I knew nothing about acting, that in all my life the only plays I had witnessed wereUncle Tom’s CabinandThe Gipsy Queen.” Nonetheless, Chapin was soon talked into accompanying Guptill into Chicago to see renowned actor Lawrence Barrett who was touring inRichelieu, a popular play of murder and unwanted advances in the court of Louis XVI by Edward Bulwer-Lytton...

Back in Chicago, penniless, his three-year acting career seemingly at an end, Chapin had to find work, fast. “I decided not to go near the theatrical agencies, for I had grown to detest the nomadic life of a barnstormer and was determined to turn my attention to something that gave greater promise for a future.” He installed Nellie at a hotel and went out to call on the city’s leading editors and publishers. This time, unlike seven years earlier in 1874 when he had made a similar set of rounds, he had better luck. The newspapers were at the beginning...

On a bright warm July morning in 1887, Chapin was making the rounds of the docks as theTribune’s new marine reporter. The post was a potentially good beat in a port city like Chicago. Maritime news was considered important, and the stories that one could pick up on the beat, from wrecks to famous passengers, were often widely read. There also was a considerable sense of fraternity among the reporters from the different papers, much like that which existed among police reporters. Although they competed vigorously, they also found time to put aside their rivalries and socialize together frequently....

Even if Chicagoans had wanted to put the events of May 1886 to rest, theTribunecertainly would not, at least not until its version of justice was meted out. Since the morning following the explosion at Haymarket Square, theTribunehad clamored for the arrest of the accused anarchists; once they were captured, the paper campaigned for their death. As execution day neared, Chapin was assigned to cover the hanging. “It was a nerve-straining task,” said Chapin, “for I had known all of them for years and had frequently reported their meetings, long before anyone suspected they were anything...

Chapin’s account of the Macaulley murder was certainly read in all of the city’s newsrooms, but it was of greatest interest in one in particular. Just a few blocks from theTribunebuilding, James J. West and Clinton A. Snowden were confronting the fragile state of affairs at theChicago Timeswhen Chapin’s prominent story gave them an idea. Since the death of Wilbur Storey, the editor who had been kind to a younger Chapin fifteen years earlier, the paper had fallen on hard times. On January 1, 1888, West, an investor with little newspaper experience, had gained control of...

On July 18, 1891, Chapin resurfaced. “After my health was restored, or partly so,” said Chapin, “I went to New York from the seashore, drifted down to Park Row and was attracted by the gilded dome of the World building.” He, and Nellie who accompanied him, were not the only ones drawn to the site. The new building erected by Joseph Pulitzer to house his prodigiously successfulNew York Worlddrew thousands of sightseers. One count placed the number of daily visitors at 2,000. Opened only eight months before the Chapins reached New York, the World building was the tallest...

On May 23, 1894, a legion of bedraggled unemployed workers, making their way across the country to petition Congress, set up camp on a small wooded strip of land known as Goose Island in the Mississippi River, near Quincy, Illinois. Led by self-styled General Charles Thomas Kelley, a typographer from theSan Francisco Chronicle, the 1,200 men had left California two months earlier as one of the divisions in an army of unemployed industrial workers known as Coxey’s Army. They were marching in protest on Washington after losing their jobs in the 1893 depression. The Goose Island contingent, the largest...

The urgency of Pulitzer’s summons became clear when Chapin reached New York. Pulitzer was in desperate need of an editor. Ernest Chamberlain, a prized recruit from theSunfive years earlier, had become a Park Row casualty of sorts in the impending war. It seemed that Chamberlain, a thin, pasty, 38-year-old man with an oversized mustache, who was the managing editor of theEvening World, had dispatched telegrams summoning every member of his staff to the office late one night toward the end of February 1898. Though dramatic, the telegrams fit the heightened sense of expectation among the press corps...

Chapin and theEvening Worldgreeted the arrival of the twentieth century with a publicity stunt. Precisely at midnight on January 1, 1901, New York’s acting mayor Randolph Guggenheimer gave the signal from his office across the street, and the monstrous presses in theWorldbuilding roared to life, drawing miles of newsprint through their swirling cylinders. Within seconds they were spewing out copies of theEvening Worldembossed with the claim of being the first paper published on the American continent in the new century. A clean copy was carefully selected and handed to an awaiting messenger who jumped...

In April 1906, the same month that an earthquake devastated San Francisco, Chapin became enmeshed in disaster relief of a different sort involving the Pulitzer family. Pulitzer had “yanked” his son, Joseph, out of Harvard University after learning he had cut classes thirty-seven times. He decided that Joe’s lessons would be better learned in a newsroom and that his new teacher would be none other than Chapin. Word of Chapin’s new duties came to him by telephone. For the minions of the Pulitzer empire, the new technology now meant that “Andes’s” orders no longer arrived solely in the form of...

Over the years, theWorldand its crusades for the common man had frequently earned it the enmity of those in power, but in 1908, Pulitzer faced the full wrath of the nation’s number-one citizen, outgoing President Theodore Roosevelt. TheWorldhad accused the president of lying about the Panamanian revolution and raised pointed questions about the possibility that the ＄40 million payment used to purchase the New Panama Canal Company may have ended up lining the pockets of some Americans with the president’s complicity. Roosevelt’s reaction was rapid and rabid. He sought to have the U.S. attorney in New...

On the morning of Wednesday, April 10, 1912, Carlos F. Hurd, a slender, professionally dressed man in his thirties, made his way through the thick crowd of men who milled around Park Row each day. The brims of a thousand hats registered an identical backward tilt as their proprietors gazed upward to read the headlines posted on tall blackboards hanging from the second story of Pulitzer’sWorldand Hearst’sJournalbuildings. There, racing back and forth on balconies, men from the newspapers tried to offer up the latest news, one step ahead of each other. During the past four decades,...

By this time a Pulitzer bonus check was like chump change to Chapin. The $1,000 could have bought him a year’s rent for his rooms in the Plaza. But within days, it would be gone to meet past obligations. Chapin was like theTitanic, seemingly unsinkable to all around him, but going down fast. There were no financial life rafts in sight, such as the potential inheritance from Sage six years earlier. Time was simply running out.¹

His last hope was the stock market. Still mostly unregulated, it remained a place where a fortune could be made. “The number of...

In the morning, the exceptional stillness that reigned in midtown Manhattan caused Chapin’s financial maelstrom to recede for a few precious moments. For a New Yorker wanting to flee the complications of modern life, Sunday, September 15, 1918, held remarkable promise. It was the third “gas-less Sunday” proclaimed by the Federal Fuel Administration, during which the use of an automobile for pleasure was prohibited to conserve fuel for the war effort. For a day, New York sounded as it did when Chapin first arrived from Chicago twenty-seven years before.

Nothing else had so dramatically transformed the city as did the...

While Chapin completed his confession before the three investigators, word that he was in police custody reached the city rooms of Park Row a few blocks away. The news confirmed everyone’s suspicions about Nellie’s death. A murder made perfect sense to those who thought of Chapin as a Simon Legree. “Few of the sweated oarsmen who manned Chapin’s galleys were surprised,” said Cobb. And for the competing evening papers, it made one hell of a story. Reporters swarmed police headquarters, where they caught up with District Attorney Swann. He promised to provide them with a copy of Chapin’s confession later...

For a prisoner lingering in one of the reception cells at Sing Sing Prison in 1919, the first clue of what awaited him was a poem etched on the wall. Its author was unknown, but its point was lost on no one who passed through.

Stone walls do not a prison make,

a poet once did sing.

He must have been a blooming fake;

He didn’t know a thing.

Perhaps ‘twas true as he did say,

When under inspiration;

But the stone and bars they use today

Make a damn good imitation¹

Undoubtedly one of the most notorious prisons in...

By the time Lawes made his offer to Chapin, a prison newspaper had been published at Sing Sing off and on for more than thirty years. Starting in the 1870s, most major prisons in the United States had some kind of inmate-operated press. Some were lively, polished, independent publications, often the darling of prison reformers. Others were heavily censored, boosterish kinds of papers that made for dull reading. In December 1887, a small, illustrated magazine calledSolitaireappeared at Sing Sing with the announcement on its masthead that it was “edited, designed, illustrated, and printed without type, without a printing...

Viola Irene Cooper’s letters marked the beginning of Chapin’s literary escape from Sing Sing. If he couldn’t physically leave the prison, he could certainly write his way out. On Thursday, December 2, 1920, the day he received Cooper’s reply to his Thanksgiving supplication, he retreated to his office to savor its every word. He waited until the last whistle had blown and quiet had descended on Sing Sing before placing a sheet into his typewriter. “I am alone, dear one, with you,” he wrote. “I’ll not write to another or permit any save you to come into my thoughts tonight....

As Chapin discovered, death was a regular part of life at Sing Sing, especially on Thursday nights. At least once a month, and sometimes more frequently, the weeknight was the chosen time for electrocution of those on death row whose turn had come. The proceedings, held in a small squat building less than a hundred feet from Chapin’s cell, began as soon as all the inmates were confined to their cells for the night. There was, however, no escaping the nocturnal business.

On Thursday, December 9, 1920, an unusually high number of inmates were scheduled to die. All day long,...

In January 1924, Constance Nelson was at her desk as usual in the Federal Reserve Bank, a modern rendition of an Italian Renaissancepalazzoin downtown Cleveland, Ohio. A single professional woman in a man’s business, Nelson was the editor of the bank’sFederal Reserve Notes. Wallace K. Pinniger, a sixty-nine-year-old man who worked in the stockroom and who had a habit of finding unusual things, came to her desk bearing a blue cloth-bound book with gold lettering. “This will tell you some things about editing,” Pinniger said, as he handed her Chapin’s autobiography. “Chapin was the best city editor...

The pardon application was finally before the governor, and positive reports from the field heightened the intoxicating scent of freedom in the summer air of 1925. “Just heard from Mr. N. that friends of yours are coming out strong and others who are not even acquaintances some of them high up in political circles,” a devoted friend wrote excitedly to Chapin in late July. “He is much encouraged.” But in the end, it wouldn’t be Chapin’s freedom that would alter his life that summer. Rather, it was that which was given to Larry, the trusted inmate who for years had...

Less than a week after Chapin’s death, New York literary agent George T. Bye received a letter from Eleanor Early, a writer in Boston. The contents intrigued him. “I know a girl who carried on a correspondence with Mr. Chapin in Sing Sing,” Early wrote. Would Bye be interested in selling them to a publisher? Maybe they could be called “Letters from a Prison Garden”? Early had selected the right agent. Bye counted many newspapermen among his clients, having been one himself until he opened his agency in 1923, and his specialty was books by people in the news. He...