Vanderbilt The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

Now in paperback, the #1 New York Times bestselling chronicle of the rise
and fall of a legendary American dynasty, from CNN anchor and journalist
Anderson Cooper and historian and novelist Katherine Howe. One of the
Washington Post's Notable Works of Nonfiction When eleven-year-old
Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father's small boat ferrying
supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no
one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness,
cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires--one in
shipping and another in railroads--that would make him the richest man in
America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs after his
death in 1877, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. Though
his son Billy doubled the money left by "the Commodore," subsequent
generations competed to find new and ever more extraordinary ways of
spending it. By 2018, when the last Vanderbilt was forced out of The
Breakers--the seventy-room summer estate in Newport, Rhode Island, that
Cornelius's grandson and namesake had built--the family would have been
unrecognizable to the tycoon who started it all. Now, the Commodore's
great-great-great-grandson Anderson Cooper, joins with historian Katherine
Howe to explore the story of his legendary family and their outsized
influence. Cooper and Howe breathe life into the ancestors who built the
family's empire, basked in the Commodore's wealth, hosted lavish galas, and
became synonymous with unfettered American capitalism and high society.
Moving from the hardscrabble wharves of old Manhattan to the lavish drawing
rooms of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue, from the ornate summer palaces of Newport
to the courts of Europe, and all the way to modern-day New York, Cooper and
Howe wryly recount the triumphs and tragedies of an American dynasty unlike
any other. Written with a unique insider's viewpoint, this is a rollicking,
quintessentially American history as remarkable as the family it so vividly
captures.