ABSTRACT
The fourteen-story World building in lower Manhattan, with its grinding presses, clamorous city room, and circulation-obsessed business office, was a far cry from the cloistered gentility of the New Republic. Walter Lippmann soon became one of the stars of Pulitzer's firmament, but it took the staff a while to get used to him. Lippmann's position on the World, and the growing reputation he gained from his books, made him a prominent figure in New York and for the first time gave him a national influence. He focused on James M. Cain, who wrote the "human interest" editorials and later became a successful novelist. Although Cain and a good many others held their boss in awe — the reporters in the city room referred to him as the "lord of the tower" — Lippmann was barely thirty-four when he inherited the editorial page.
