The Horace Greeley Foundation

Greeley expressed his view of his job as a writer: “Writing for the common people, I have aimed to be lucid and simple. I write for the great mass of intelligent, observant, reflecting farmers and mechanics, and if I succeed in making my positions clearly understood I do not fear that they will be rejected.”

One biographer commented, “His style is strong, concentrated, and Saxon, sometimes descending into colloquialism. It is the style of the man of action, who aims at immediate effect, and who is careless of ornament or other superficial qualities.”

In addition to his newspaper writing, Greeley was the author of many books, including the two-volume The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the U.S.A., 1860-1864 and his autobiography, Recollections of a Busy Life.

As an editor, he promoted the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was Henry David Thoreau’s agent and published a draft of  Walden in the Tribune. He hired the feminist and Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller as book editor and foreign correspondent. He loaned money to Edgar Allen Poe.

He published Charles Dickens under a pen name before he was known in the U.S. Later two of Dickens’s novels were serialized in the Tribune.

The Tribune hired Samuel Clemens as a staff writer and sent him on a tour of Europe. The result was Mark Twain’s first book, Innocents Abroad.