Yellow

Yellow chronicles two wars - the clash of Cuban rebels against the occupying forces of Spain that led to the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the war for readers waged by the "yellow press" between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The novel is recounted by the writer Ambrose Bierce, who is recalling the events while he lies dying in Mexico sixteen years later. His story is based on the recollections of the great American journalist and artist Fredric Remington. The backbone of the novel is the true story of the daring rescue of a beautiful young revolutionary, the "Joan of Arc of Cuba," by Remington and Richard Harding Davis, who were Hearst's "men in Cuba," trying to get one up on Pulitzer's World reporters. Meanwhile, back in New York City the newspaper war and its daily printed fictions were forcing President McKinley into a war with Spain he didn't believe was necessary and didn't want to fight. When the cry "Remember the Maine!" went up, the war of words and ink was transformed into one of blood and bullets. Daniel Lynch's Yellow vividly plunges us into the turbulent past and brings to life major historical personages who were responsible for the last one hundred years, known as the American Century.