The First Tycoon

Zusatztext 43058441 Informationen zum Autor T. J. Stiles has held the Gilder Lehrman Fellowship in American History at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, taught at Columbia University, and served as adviser for the PBS series The American Experience. His first book, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, won the Ambassador Book Award and the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, and was a New York Times Notable Book. He has written for The New York Times Book Review, Salon.com, Smithsonian, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in San Francisco. Klappentext A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius "Commodore Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington's presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation's largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire. Lincoln consulted him on steamship strategy during the Civil War; Jay Gould was first his uneasy ally and then sworn enemy; and Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States, was his spiritual counselor. We see Vanderbilt help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporationin fact, as T. J. Stiles elegantly argues, Vanderbilt did more than perhaps any other individual to create the economic world we live in today. In The First Tycoon, Stiles offers the first complete, authoritative biography of this titan, and the first comprehensive account of the Commodore's personal life. It is a sweeping, fast-moving epic, and a complex portrait of the great man. Vanderbilt, Stiles shows, embraced the philosophy of the Jacksonian Democrats and withstood attacks by his conservative enemies for being too competitive. He was a visionary who pioneered business models. He was an unschooled fistfighter who came to command the respect of New York's social elite. And he was a father who struggled with a gambling-addicted son, a husband who was loving yet abusive, and, finally, an old man who was obsessed with contacting the dead. The First Tycoon is the exhilarating story of a man and a nation maturing together: the powerful account of a man whose life was as epic and complex as American history itself. Leseprobe The IslanderThey came to learn his secrets. Well before the appointed hour of two o'clock in the afternoon on November 12, 1877, hundreds of spectators pushed into a courtroom in lower Manhattan. They included friends and relatives of the contestants, of course, as well as leading lawyers who wished to observe the forensic skills of the famous attorneys who would try the case. But most of the teeming mass of men and womenmany fashionably dressed, crowding in until they were packed against the back wallwanted to hear the details of the life of the richest man the United States had ever seen. The trial over the will of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the famous, notorious Commodore, was about to begin.Shortly before the hour, the crowd parted to allow in William H. Vanderbilt, the Commodore's eldest son, and his lawyers, led by Henry L. Clinton. William, glancing carelessly and indifferently around the room, removed his overcoat and comfortably settled himself in his chair, the New York Times reported; meanwhile his lawyers shook hands with the opposing team, led by Scott Lord, who represented William's sister Mary Vanderbilt La Bau. At exactly two o'clock, the judgecalled the Surrogate in this Surrogate Courtstrode briskly in from his chambers through a side door, stepped up to the dais, and took his seat. Are you ready, gentlemen? he asked. Lord and Clinton e...

ldquo;A penetrating portrait of a complex, self-made titan.”
            -Citation for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography 2010
 
“With deep and imaginative research and graceful writing, T. J. Stiles’s The First Tycoon tells the extraordinary story of a brutally competitive man who was hard to love but irresistibly interesting as a truly pivotal historical figure. With few letters and no diaries, and with layers of legend to carve through, Stiles captures Cornelius Vanderbilt as a person and as a force who shaped the transportation revolution, all but invented unbridled American capitalism, and left his mark not only all over New York City but, for better or worse, all over our economic landscape.”
            -Citation for the National Book Award in Nonfiction 2009
 
“T.J. Stiles presents the magnate as a man in full.”
            -Boston Globe Best Books of 2009
 
“Stiles writes with care and panache about the quintessential ‘robber baron,’ a man widely revered as well as hated.”
            -The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009
 
“A definitive biography . . . Stiles brings the Commodore, warts and all, to life in this new study, which is at once up-to-date in scholarly terms, analytically incisive, and lucidly written.”
            -Raleigh News and Observer Best Books of 2009
 
“A monumental biography.”
            -The Kansas City Star Top 100 Books of 2009
 
 “At long last a biography worthy of the Commodore, meticulously researched, superbly written, and filled with original insights.”
            -Maury Klein, author of The Life and Legend of Jay Gould
 
“T.J. Stiles writes with the magisterial sweep of a great historian and the keen psychological insight of a great biographer. The First Tycoon is the fullest, most perceptive chronicle ever written of the life and times of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the epitome of unfettered, winner-take-all capitalism. With panache and admirable ease, Stiles maps the financial and political currents on which Vanderbilt buccaneered and shows that it was Vanderbilt, more than anyone else, who enabled business to evolve into Big Business.”
            -Patricia O’Toole, author of When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House
 
“T.J. Stiles has given us a balanced and absorbing biography of this colorful and often ruthless entrepreneur, the first of the ‘robber barons’ who transformed the American economy in the nineteenth century.”
           -James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
 
“The First Tycoon is a brilliant exposition of the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt and the entrepreneurial environment that he shaped. Readers will look at Grand Central Station and much else in American life with fresh eyes.”
            -Joyce Appleby, author of The Restless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
 
“The definitive biography of Commodore Vanderbilt. Both as portrait of an American original and as a book that brings to life an important slice of American history long neglected, this is biography at its very best. A magnificent achievement.”
            -Arthur Vanderbilt …

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