Vanderbilt
The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty
Cooper tells his own family's story: how the Vanderbilts built the greatest fortune in America and then, generation by generation, spent it all away.
Cooper and historian Katherine Howe tell the story of his own ancestors, the Vanderbilts, who built the largest fortune in nineteenth-century America off railroads and shipping. Across a few generations the family spent it back down to almost nothing, on marble mansions, doomed marriages and Gilded Age spectacle. Cooper writes as an insider with no inheritance, tracing how staggering wealth was made and then, deliberately and spectacularly, unmade.
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