Morgan - by Jean Strouse (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A thoroughly documented, conscientiously nonpartisan, and rounded life of the financial colossus . . . More completely than those who have labored over this gigantic figure before, Strouse exposes the whole man."--The Boston Globe

"A masterpiece . . . No one else has told the tale of J. Pierpont Morgan in the detail, depth, and understanding of Jean Strouse."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A magnificent biography . . . a breathtaking accomplishment . . . an incomparable book."-- American Heritage

"[Strouse's] command of the varied and complex aspects of Morgan's life and work is nothing short of dazzling, and her writing is exemplary, even in passages dealing with the complexities of high finance."--Houston Chronicle

"Strouse is no apologist for Morgan, but she finds much in him to admire and goes far past the stereotypical robber baron image to which muckrakers and their heirs reduced him. . . . It is, in the end, the largest accomplishment of this ambitious book that it gives us not a myth, but a man."--The Washington Post Book World

"The Morgan that Jean Strouse has brought to life in her masterful, long- awaited biography is deeply human, the most intricate and integrated portrait we have yet had. . . . Her storytelling [has] the richness and penetration of a novel."--New York Observer

"By uncovering the big- government impulses of capitalism's patron saint, Strouse gives us a generous sense of Morgan's contradictions. She peers thoughtfully behind the myth of an economic despot to discover a more nuanced figure."--Fortune

"[Strouse] uses marvelous detail . . . to breathe life into a nineteenth-century icon. And she makes plain and readable for the layman the . . . financial controversies of Morgan's day."--USA Today

"[A] brilliant new study of J. P. Morgan."--Times Literary Supplement (London)

"Elegant, impressively researched . . . With a sure command of her narrative and an instinct for the telling detail, Strouse has created a subtle, shaded portrait."--Chicago Tribune

"Based on painstaking research on sources perhaps never tapped, including the Morgan family papers, this study is likely to be definitive for a hundred years."--Baltimore Sun

"Strouse has amassed a huge amount of information about Morgan. . . . Her style brings clarity to nineteenth-century financial matters and her storytelling is riveting."--Hartford Courant

"[Strouse] is the first to integrate the very personal biography of a man previously seen as stock villain or hero [and] to set this complex character in the context of richly reported social history."--Chicago Sun-Times

"Through Strouse's use of new sources and her exceptional ability to tell a riveting, intricately detailed story, she has scored a resounding triumph."--New York Post

"Enormously entertaining."--New York Daily News

"Graceful, lucid."--Foreign Affairs

About the Author

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.