peak circulation of 20 million readers a day in the mid-1930s. He poorly managed finances and was so deeply in debt during the Great Depression that most of his assets had to be liquidated in the late 1930s. Hearst managed to keep his newspapers and magazines. His life story was the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, the lead character in Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane (1941). His Hearst Castle, constructed on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon, has been preserved as a State Historical Monument and is designated as a National Historic Landmark. Early life Hearst was born in San Francisco to George Hearst, a millionaire mining engineer, owner of gold and other mines through his corporation, and his much younger wife Phoebe Apperson Hearst, from a small town in Missouri. The elder Hearst later entered politics. He served as a U.S. Senator, first appointed for a brief period in 1886 and was then elected later that year. He served from 1887 to his death in 1891. His paternal great-grandfather was John Hearst of Ulster Protestant origin. John Hearst, with his wife and six children, migrated to America from Ballybay, County Monaghan, Ireland, as part of the Cahans Exodus in 1766. The family settled in South Carolina. Their immigration to South Carolina was spurred in part by the colonial government's policy that encouraged the immigration of Irish Protestants, many of Scots origin. The names "John Hearse" and "John Hearse Jr." appear on the council records of October 26, 1766, being credited with meriting of land on the Long Canes (in what became Abbeville District), based upon to heads of household and for each dependent of a Protestant immigrant. (The "Hearse" spelling of the family name was never used afterward by the family members themselves, nor any family of any size.) Hearst's mother, née Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson, was also of Scots-Irish ancestry; her family came from Galway. She was appointed as the first woman Regent of University of California, Berkeley, donated funds to establish libraries at several universities, funded many anthropological expeditions, and founded the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Hearst attended preparatory school at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He enrolled in the Harvard College class of 1885. While there, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the A.D. Club (a Harvard Final club), the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and the Lampoon before