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.