William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst (29 April 1863 - 14 August 1951) is a prominent U.S. newspapers, was born in San Francisco, California.

William Randolph Hearst was the only son of George, a successful miner who became multimillionaires, and then the U.S. Senate from California, and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, a former school teacher from Missouri.

Hearst is the king of media. He founded a newspaper empire, now the Hearst Corporation. He has been known for sensational stories. The stories were often wrong, or does not correspond with reality before.

The film Citizen Kane Orson Welles tells the story of William Randolph Hearst.

Early life

Hearst was born in San Francisco to millionaire mining engineer George Hearst and Phoebe Apperson Hearst. George Hearst's paternal grandfather, John Hearst, who was of Scottish origin, emigrated to America with his wife and six children in 1766 and settled in South Carolina. Their immigration to America was spurred in part by the state government's policy that encouraged the immigration of Protestants. The names "John Hearse" and "John Hearse Jr." appear on the council records on the October 26, 1766, being credited with meriting 400 acres (1.6 km2) and 100 acres (0.40 km2) of land on the Long Canes (in what became Abbeville District), based upon 100 acres (0.40 km2) to heads of household and 50 acres (200,000 m2) for each dependent of a Protestant immigrant. The "Hearse" spelling of the family name never was used afterward by the family members themselves, or any family of any size. A separate theory purports that one branch of a "Hurst" family of Virginia (originally from Plymouth Colony) moved to South Carolina at about the same time and changed the spelling of its surname of over a century to that of the emigrant Hearsts. Hearst's mother was of Irish ancestry; her family came from Galway.

Following preparation at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, Hearst enrolled in the Harvard College class of 1885, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Alpha chapter), the A.D. Club (a prestigious Harvard Final club), and of the Harvard Lampoon prior to his expulsion from Harvard for giving several of his professors expensive chamber pots with their names elaborately painted on the inside.

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