This biography follows a New Hampshire-born editor, born in 1811, who did not breathe for the first 20 minutes of his life. Raised in poverty by a father constantly fleeing debt, he ran away at 15 to apprentice as a printer and arrived in New York City in 1831 with almost nothing. Living in a boarding house that banned meat, alcohol, coffee and spices, he saved enough to buy his own type. In 1841 he founded a daily newspaper that rejected the scandal-driven penny press, mailed a weekly edition to farmers and frontier readers, promoted utopian socialism, vegetarianism, feminism and temperance, and employed Karl Marx as a European correspondent for a decade.

His three-month term in Congress in 1848 produced an exposé of colleagues’ padded travel expenses, a bill to ban flogging in the Navy and a proposal to rename the country. At the 1860 Republican convention he worked against the front-runner, a former ally, helping open the way for Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War he demanded immediate emancipation, drawing Lincoln’s reply that saving the Union came first, and held unauthorized peace talks with Confederate representatives in Canada. After the war he helped pay the bail of the former Confederate president, and readers canceled subscriptions. In 1872 he ran for president with Democratic backing, lost his wife days before the election, lost in a landslide, and died weeks later.

• Biographers have speculated that oxygen deprivation at birth shaped his singular focus and difficulty reading social cues.
• He kept his strict diet for nearly the rest of his life.
• A campaign cartoon showed him reaching across a grave to shake hands with Lincoln’s assassin.
• After his defeat he was institutionalized and died before the Electoral College cast its ballots.
• His funeral in New York drew his fiercest rivals, including the president who had just defeated him.