Morgan: American Financier - Paperback

by Jean Strouse (Author)

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - The definitive portrait of the Gilded Age icon J. Pierpont Morgan, presenting his tumultuous life both in and out of the public eye, from the award-winning author of Alice James and Family Romance

"Magnificent . . . the fullest and most revealing look at this remarkable, complex man that we are likely to get."--The Wall Street Journal

"It is hard to imagine a biographer coming any closer to perfection."--St. Louis Post-Dispatch

History has remembered him as a complex and contradictory figure, part robber baron and part patron saint. J. Pierpont Morgan earned his reputation as "the Napoleon of Wall Street" by reorganizing the nation's railroads and creating industrial giants such as General Electric and U.S. Steel. At a time when the country had no Federal Reserve system, he appointed himself a one-man central bank. He had two wives, three yachts, four children, six houses, mistresses, and one of the finest art collections in America.

In this extraordinary book, award-winning biographer Jean Strouse vividly portrays the financial colossus, the avid patron of the arts, and the entirely human character behind all the myths.

Author Biography

Jean Strouse is the author of Alice James, A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and Morgan, American Financier. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Newsweek, Architectural Digest, and Slate. She has been president of the Society of American Historians, a consultant (oral historian) to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and a fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the executive council of the Authors Guild, she is currently the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library.