From the acclaimed author of The Pattons and Patriot Pirates: a book that celebrates America's forgotten war correspondents, men who were legends in their time; who, between 1860 and 1910, between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War--when empires fell and dynasties flourished--led romantic, thrilling lives on the edgiest frontiers of time and place: seeing the world, breaking the stories, making news themselves during the time when newspapers made the most foreign of landscapes available, and the circulation wars were revolutionizing contemporary life, shaping global events, and making history.

The first war correspondent, William H. Russell of The Times of London, described himself and his profession as "the miserable parent of a luckless tribe." Others saw it differently: the term war correspondent became the stuff of dreams and an urgent romantic calling. Now, in Hell Before Breakfast, the acclaimed historian Robert Patton writes of these fearless young correspondents: Henry Villard and John Russell Young of The New York Herald, and George Smalley and Holt White of The New York Tribune, among many others--correspondents who were center stage and who, in their on-the-spot reporting, captured large events as they were happening, and whose intrepid spirit and sense of adventure inspired generations of storytellers, explorers, artists, writers, statesmen, and politicians, even moviemakers, from Kipling and Churchill to Theodore Roosevelt, N. C. Wyeth, D. W. Griffith, and Cecil B. DeMille, each of whose adolescence was shaped during this spectacular age of war correspondence.