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Suddenly, surprisingly, spectacularly, there appears a breathtaking new masterwork in U.S. history and in the history of U.S. journalism, a tale rooted in San Francisco, New York and Havana, a story through which stride such purely American figures as Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis and Theodore Roosevelt, and the remarkable thing about it is that this biography has its origins in Montreal and was written by a man born in Winnipeg and raised in Edmonton, who edits a magazine in Toronto.

• The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, by Kenneth Whyte, Random House Canada, 546 pages, $35

Stranger things have happened, such as the way William Randolph Hearst conceived of and then launched his gaudy, controversial newspaper empire, which is perhaps why the matching of Kenneth Whyte, the entrepreneurial editor of Maclean's, with Hearst himself has produced such an incendiary, intoxicating result. Let an American say this about the latest offering of Random House Canada: The Uncrowned King is one of the most remarkable and captivating biographies of an American written this year in any country, including my own.

The story of Hearst and yellow journalism is well known, and, readers of this volume will soon know, misinterpreted and misunderstood as well. Was Hearst a slimeball? Probably. Was he a spectacular visionary and dreamer? Absolutely. Did he drag journalism into the gutter? Some days. Were his eyes on the far horizon? No question about it. Did his newspapers produce horrifying garbage? Sure. Did they also produce some of the most insightful work of its or any age? Afraid so.

This isn't the usual Hearst narrative, the story of how a hard-charging vulgarian stormed into the temple of journalism, knocked all the antiques aside, trampled on well-loved traditions and folkways, produced cheeseball journals unworthy for wrapping a walleye, cheapened the U.S. conversation and put a dollar sign on his masthead even as he charged only a penny for his wares. Some of those elements are facts, but they do not constitute the truth.

“ Whyte has produced a biography not only of a press lord, but also of the press in the time of its lords ”

Maybe we nudge a little closer to the truth when we examine how Stephen Crane, the author of the first great American war novel and one of the show horses in the Hearst stable, described the fictional editor of a fictional newspaper in one of his novels: "a kind of poet using his millions romantically." Such a departure from the received truth requires an explanation, and Whyte sets his out gradually, subtly, no blast from the trumpet, simply a series of delicate taps at an orchestra triangle as the work progresses. His theory is that Hearst's entry into New York journalism didn't set all of the city's newspapers on a race to the bottom, but instead drove his paper, the Journal, "and the penny press, as a class, upmarket."

More revisionism: It wasn't Hearst's money but his personality that pushed him to the fore. "[H]e was young, talented, driven, and willing to put everything he had on the line in pursuit of his journalistic ambitions," Whyte writes. "He was far more interested in making a great paper than in turning a profit."

And it wasn't his eye for a profit that compelled him to make Cuba, and the outrages of the Spanish occupation there at the turn of the past century, an international cause célèbre. "His anger," Whyte says, "was well founded." It was, in short, morality, not money, that was the motivation.

One final example, also grounded in Cuba: Every (North) American schoolboy knows the (very possibly apocryphal) story of how New York's newest press lord told Frederic Remington (who would become known more for his signature paintings and sculptures of the American West) that he should furnish the pictures and Hearst would provide the war. This has been a major part of the Hearst mythology, fed by his other biographers.

"Much less has been said about what his paper got right," Whyte says, "although the list is rather impressive." These include the notion that the struggle between the Cubans and their Spanish masters was bitter and brutal; the fact that the Spanish added substantially to the Americas' collection of human-rights atrocities; and the reality that the Spanish reform efforts on the island were hollow. Spanish Cuba was a charnel house, or at least a house of horrors, and Hearst told the world all about it, albeit in lurid, sensationalistic terms. It may not have been a tale told well, but it surely was a tale worth telling - even though the legend persists that the Spanish-American war was Hearst's war, hostilities for hubris and for profit.

Whyte has produced a biography not only of a press lord, but also of the press in the time of its lords, especially Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and Charles Anderson Dana of the Sun, a sparkling, shimmery era of creativity, guile and excess, soaring ambition and soaring words, sensationalism and sensational stories.

It was a time when pictures and graphics told a thousand words, and then were accompanied by 10,000 more words, when men (Pulitzer in this case) could say that the power of the press was "the power of speaking out the sentiment of the people, the voice of justice, the inspiration of wisdom, the determinations of patriotism, and the heart of the whole people." When was the last time you heard the head of one of today's newspaper chains talk like that? When was the last time you heard someone in public life actually utter the word "wisdom," or show any?

We know Hearst's flaws, and in this volume Whyte does not scrimp on them. They are there, unavoidable, unendearing, in some cases unforgivable, in almost all cases unforgettable. But Whyte reminds us of the Hearst credo - go hard after the news - and in the course of this story the reader inevitably wonders how many of today's press midgets would have thought to carry Winston Churchill's account of Cuba's struggle for independence, and to send one of the premier war correspondents of the century, Richard Harding Davis, to cover the Princeton-Yale football game.

"He tried harder than any of his predecessors to arrest and absorb readers," Whyte writes. "He chased even the most sordid human-interest stories exactly as he covered politics: with naked enthusiasm and an unparalleled application of journalistic resources. And there was now so much to chase."

This is the autumn of journalism's discontent. Newspapers are financially strapped and, worse than that, stripped of their sense of humour, sense of nobility and sense of confidence. Whyte's trip to another century proves to be a trip to another sensibility. Would that we could, in our century, arrest and absorb readers, show naked enthusiasm and apply unparalleled resources, for there is now so much to chase.

David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.