“I’ve been watching him, and I notice that when he wants cake, he wants cake; and he wants it now. And I notice that after a while he gets his cake.” –Senator George Hearst, on his son, William Randolph Hearst

A lively, unexpected and impeccably researched piece of popular history, The Uncrowned King reveals how an unheralded young newspaperman from San Francisco walked into the media capital of the world and created the most successful daily of his time, pushing the medium to an unprecedented level of excitement and influence, and leading serious observers to wonder if newspapers might be “the greatest force in civilization,” more powerful even than kings and popes and presidents.

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FINALIST 2009 - National Business Book Award
FINALIST 2010 - Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction

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“Incendiary, intoxicating…. Remarkable and captivating.”
— The Globe and Mail

“Whyte accomplishes his mission, achieving the same conclusion that Hearst himself also reached: those were the days.”
— The New York Times

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Kenneth Whyte is the editor-in-chief of Maclean’s, Canada’s weekly current affairs magazine. Over the course of two decades he has become one of Canada’s premier journalists, also having served as editor of the monthly Saturday Night magazine at the peak of its popularity and as founding editor-in-chief of the National Post.

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