Joseph Pulitzer was born in April 1937 in a well-off family in the Hungarian border town of Marko. His father Philip is a Hungarian Jew and his mother Louis Berger is an Austrian German. 1853, the whole family moved to Budapest, where little Pulitzer received a good family and school education.

1868 is an important turning point of Pulitzer's fate. He was hired as a reporter by Carl Schurz, the boss of the German newspaper "Western Post" that the St. Louis Library met.