Show & Tell: They Go Together

One of the things I like about writing biography is that it is both a narrative and interpretive art. With a biography, we have a life story to tell, with a beginning, middle, and end, with intersecting characters who have inner and outer lives. But we also have some explaining to do—a duty to explain our subject in the context of the surrounding world, and to explain that world through the life of our subject.

That brings us up against one of the oldest, and most useful, pieces of writing advice: Show, don't tell. If you can unfold your explanations and interpretations through the actions and speech of your characters, so much the better. You avoid halting the narrative flow, or deadening the reading experience. For example, in writing about the famous Erie War, the fight for the Erie Railway between Cornelius Vanderbilt and Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, and Jim Fisk, I illustrated some of the larger significance of the conflict by quoting newspaper editorials, which also illustrated how closely the public was watching these events.

But it's worth bearing in mind another piece of advice, from George Orwell. In "Politics and the English Language," he sets out some very fine rules for writing. The last rule is to ignore all the previous ones, rather than say something barbarous. The point, of course, is that all rules for writing are mere guidelines. With the right reasons, and the right skill, you can and should break them.

So it is with "show, don't tell." Sometimes a biographer really should tell—explain what's going on, why it matters, how it fits into the larger context of the times, or the main character's life. This is especially true because a good biographer shouldn't take existing interpretations of the times (and main subject) for granted. A biographer is historian as well as writer, and should think hard about the context, and come up with new conclusions when warranted.

How to tell, without harpooning your narrative? There's a number of tricks to it. First, write well. Second, make use of the reader's primary motivation: expectations. My favorite definition of plot is the creation of expectations, followed by their fulfillment (though not always in the way the reader expects). Before launching into an interpretive passage, it helps to set the reader up for the action to follow. Before a discussion of gravity, it's good to stop the narrative right after Wile E. Coyote runs off the edge of the cliff and looks down, feet still pumping, but before he plunges.

Third, interpretive passages have to feel like an organic part of the narrative. The reader must feel that he or she needs to understand what you're explaining in order to follow the events. This is a good test for the writer, because if the reader really doesn't need to know, then the passage should be moved, rewritten, or cut entirely. Another example from my forthcoming book (which I hope works the way I've described): When Vanderbilt challenged the steamboat monopoly on the Hudson River, he appealed for public support in terms that directly reflected the politics of the day. I felt that I had to explain politics (and offer my own interpretation of them) to fully explain what was at a stake in this business battle, why it mattered to the public, and what it said about the times.

Still, a biography remains a story, first and foremost. I find that historical themes draw me to a subject, but a biography of that subject is not an academic monograph. It is, we hope, a literary product, one that gives the reader pleasure—and a reason to keep reading—from the first page to the last.

Recession-Proof Entertainment

My author tour upon the publication of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt is taking shape. I'll be speaking about the life of Commodore Vanderbilt, and his significance for our world today, in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Boston, New York, Albany, Newport, and (of course) San Francisco and the Bay Area. I would like to come to Chicago as well (any takers?), and hopefully other venues will go on the list.

For the tour schedule, go to the Tour & Talks page on my main website, www.tjstiles.com.

Between now and April 21, when The First Tycoon is published, I'll be adding more information about the book, including essays and primary sources not included in the book itself. If you click on the Jesse James page, you'll see what I did for my last book; I hope to do something similar for The First Tycoon. This is the sort of interconnection between the Internet and book publishing that I think is really helpful for readers. Websites are ephemeral, and cannot be relied upon as authoritative sources. But they can be a useful resource for readers when they are connected to a well-researched, carefully crafted book, offering material that just doesn't belong in the book itself.

If you're interested in buying The First Tycoon prior to publication, I urge you to order it through your local bookstore. Support booksellers—we authors, and readers, need them.

Support Your Local Bookstore

This post does not have much to do with the craft of writing biography, but it goes directly to the future of biography writing. Please, I beg you: Support your local bookstore.

Of course, buying new books anywhere supports authors. If you buy a new book from Amazon, the author still gets royalties (or, at least, the same percentage goes toward paying back the advance, moving the author closer to getting royalties). But there is a great value in traditional bricks-and-mortar bookstores, and publishing (and readers) will be the poorer if they go out of business.

The belief that the Internet would democratize publishing has proved completely wrong. No one reads self-published books online. Instead, we go online to buy books. But the online shopping experience is very different from going to a bookstore. When we go to an online retailer, we already know what we want in most cases. In a bookstore, by contrast, we browse, we read staff recommendations, we discover new books and new authors.

Online bookselling rewards books that already have a lot of attention. If a book gets good publicity, people know about it, and go online to look for it. But buyers are less likely to discover books and authors they didn't know about in advance. Instead of democratizing publishing, the Internet tends to reward success (or publicity). 

Now, I'm not knocking publicity. We all hope for it. We love it when we get it. The books that receive a lot of press usually deserve it. But the world is richer for those little-known writers who rise up out of nowhere, who ride the word-of-mouth tidal wave that booksellers often start. 

Booksellers are in trouble. Our culture will be poorer if they go out of business in large numbers. Please, make a point of dropping by a bookstore, maybe getting a coffee if they sell it, and browsing. You just might find something you never thought you'd buy—and you'll be doing future writers, and readers, a favor.

A Reminder: More Information Here

Just a reminder: For more information specific to my forthcoming book, The First Tycoon, be sure to go to my main website, and check out the First Tycoon and Vanderblog pages. It's a different Vanderblog from this one, with additional details about the book.

The Curse of Timeliness

Book publishing is a slow business. For a select few books, publishers will "crash" publication, rushing extremely time-sensitive manuscripts into print in a few weeks. Under normal circumstances, an author can expect to wait about a year for publication after delivery and acceptance of a manuscript. True, you should get a couple of chances to make changes, but we're talking about small changes, not wholesale rewriting, as the book moves through copyediting and typesetting.

For the nineteenth-century biographer crowd, to which I belong, this is not a big deal. Usually. But with both Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, and my forthcoming biography, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, I'm placed in the unusual situation of having labored for years on a project that suddenly is timely, because of dramatic events entirely outside of my control.

With Jesse James, the event was the wave of terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Terrorism became the central issue in American public life. As it so happens, I had just finished the manuscript of my book, which argues that Jesse James is best understood as a kind of precursor to or foreshadowing of the modern terrorist. Yes, I wrote, he was in it for the money, the thrills, and the compulsions of a personality distorted by a savage guerrilla war; but what set him apart from all the other post-Civil War criminals was his insistence on putting his crimes in a political light, in positioning himself as an anti-Reconstruction Confederate avenger. He added something new to the mix. It was his political symbolism that made him popular (among ex-Confederates) and significant during his lifetime.

I changed only one thing in the book after 9/11: I added an endnote that explained that the book was written before the attacks, and was not altered in any way as a result. Still, one or two reviewers carelessly accused me of equating Jesse James with Osama bin Laden (despite a sentence in the text itself that says I did not mean to equate him with Osama bin Laden, or the Red Brigades, or any other current or recent terrorist group). 

You can't control the idiocy or laziness of reviewers, of course, but—even in such obvious error—these cases point to how uncomfortable it can be to suddenly be timely. I'm actually quite fortunate that the overwhelming majority of reviewers didn't make the same mistake.

Now I have a book coming out about a major business figure who lived through four major financial panics and personified many of the economic and cultural transformations that created the modern world. I finished The First Tycoon well in advance of the financial meltdown of late 2008, and changed nothing as a result of the disaster. Still, it will be interesting to see what readers and reviewers think of it in light of current events. Will they see it as enlightening, offering a deeper background to business practices and economic structures? Or will someone go off half-cocked and accuse me of writing with an eye on the present? Or will some reviewers just not like the book on its own merits? 

We'll see. I wouldn't change anything now because of recent events, because I mean for the book to last, not to flare and fade. It offers my considered judgment, and my best effort to stick to a purely historical context in order to explain Vanderbilt and how he was seen. But, if nothing else, publishing this biography is a different experience for me than I expected, as a result of the meltdown. 

Who Are Those Other Guys?

This photograph shows Cornelius Vanderbilt, seated on the right with crossed legs and top hat, on the veranda of the Congress Hall hotel in Saratoga Springs in the 1870s. I like this image. It nicely illustrates life in Saratoga, the most famous resort town of the nineteenth century. It also shows what a celebrity Vanderbilt was. 

In broader terms, it raises an essential question for the biographer: Who are all those other guys?

Secondary characters are as important to a biography as they are to a novel, but they are often overlooked and underused. Over the course of years of research and writing, the biographer can begin to grow a bit Ahab-like, ignoring all the other whales in the ocean. And, of course, when we pick up a biography, we expect it to tell a specific individual's story, and we can grow frustrated when a book wanders off topic for too long.

Secondary characters, though, serve valuable purposes in both research and narrative. By digging into the lives of those who surround the main character, a biographer often discovers new dimensions of the primary subject, uncovering fresh sources and facts. To take just one example from my study of Vanderbilt, I dug into the life of his second son, Corneil (as Cornelius Jeremiah was called). Epileptic and addicted to gambling, Corneil might not seem like a worthwhile target for research; in fact, he was a prolific letter-writer whose correspondence dwelled on his family troubles. His very weaknesses made him the perfect light for illuminating the long-overlooked emotional life of his father, who struggled with contradictory feelings for Corneil.

Secondary characters are invaluable in crafting a narrative as well. For one thing, subplots and diversions from the main narrative line enrich a biography, just as they do in a novel, offering relief from a monotonous focus on just one character. Zeroing in on secondary characters also illuminates how events take place through the intersection of the intentions of multiple individuals, the collision of sometimes conflicting agendas. By following the purposes and actions of those who surround the main character, a biographer offers a fuller understanding of how that life unfolded—and can provide some dramatic tension.

Lest I sound like I believe I am a great craftsman in the use of secondary characters, I should note that I had little choice. Vanderbilt left no collection of papers. The letters by and about him are scattered in multiple archives, and do not amount to the kind of treasure trove that draws biographers back to a well-documented subject again and again. In pursuit of more information, I was forced to delve into the lives of those who surrounded him. Fortunately for me, necessity was truly a virtue in this case. In fact, it's a virtue in every case. Keep asking who those other guys are; the answers are bound to be illuminating.

The Future of the Past

A friend of mine, a California state bureaucrat with too much time on his hands (have the furloughs started alread?), raises the question of whether biography will survive in the future. Well, he didn't put it quite that way. The problem he identified is one of evidence: How can we write about someone who lives in the age of ephemeral e-mail and text messaging?

My personal solution is to stick to the nineteenth century, at least for now. I just prefer to deal with dead people—no interviews to conduct, no worries about angering anyone. (And it's my main area of interest, too.) But my work on my two biographies, The First Tycoon and Jesse James, suggests how biography might survive in an age of scarce information preservation.

Neither Cornelius Vanderbilt nor Jesse James wrote many letters, and neither left behind a collection of papers, let alone diaries. It's one reason why there have been so few serious books about either man—only one, published in 1942, in the case of Vanderbilt. Big collections of correspondence, diaries, and other manuscript material usually are the biographer's biggest resource. I had to work around this gap.

First, a caveat: Both Vanderbilt and James did write letters. Vanderbilt in particular wrote a fair number that have survived; after all, he wasn't a criminal, and he was a central figure in American public life for half a century. And others wrote rich, informative letters about him that still exist in manuscript collections around the country. 

But there weren't nearly as many letters as I would have wanted. So I turned to other sources.

1) Newspapers: The digitization of newspapers (historic as well as for publication today) makes text searching incredibly easy. Too easy, in fact, because I spent a lot of time sifting out classified advertising for property on Brooklyn's Vanderbilt Avenue. Future biographers will have to hope that newspapers are being careful about preserving their digital output.

2) Court records: Some of these I found in the papers of lawyers who worked on cases related to Vanderbilt, and then preserved the depositions. But I spent months in court archives, uncovering a staggering amount of information—some of it useful, some of it actually colorful.

3) Corporate records: The directors' minutes and correspondence of railroad corporations may not sound like fun reading, but can be very revealing, especially when correlated with information from other sources. I found, for example, that in the early 1840s Vanderbilt carried out a subtle game to undercut the Stonington Railroad, a key New England line that linked New York and Boston by means of a steamboat connection on Long Island Sound. No single source would have revealed the whole picture, but correspondence of company officers, court records, newspapers, corporate reports, and directors' minutes built up a fascinating whole. At the end of this campaign, Vanderbilt seized the presidency of the Stonington, decades before he became famous as a railroad king.

4) Government reports: Congress and state legislatures conducted hearings on issues directly related to Vanderbilt's life, often bringing him up for testimony. The testimony usually was published. In addition, Congress regularly asked for, received, and published executive-branch correspondence and other documents. Readex has digitized the Congressional Serial Set, which includes these reports, and they are now text-searchable. At your major research library, of course.

5) National Archives: The Bush-Cheney Administration did its best to ruin the lives of future historians and biographers by destroying records or classifying them, but technically, at least, everything the government does is supposed to be preserved at the National Archives. Through some dogged endnote-digging, I found some remarkable sources at the National Archives, especially at the new facility in College Park, Maryland, where I found depositions and other first-hand accounts of the activities of Vanderbilt's secret agents in his war against William Walker in Nicaragua in the 1850s—part of my wholesale rewriting of this story, thanks also to court records and other sources.

Make no mistake: The end of the age of correspondence is a huge blow for future biographers. We may have to see a dedicated, ongoing effort to interview public figures, to create an oral history archive to fill in the gap. But it is possible to work around a lack of letters.

Bill me . . . really

It's tough being an information creator in an information economy.

The news about the news business has been uniformly bad. Believe me, it's no better in the world of book publishing. (Please, please, patronize your local bookstore—especially if it's independent, and not part of a chain.) It's highly ironic, of course, because we're famously in an information economy, and so information creators should be riding high. But they're not. Why?

Good question, and I'm glad you asked. The problem, as I see it, has been an erroneous conflation of the business of information creation with that of information distribution. Some Internet idiot once said, "Information wants to be free," and newspapers obliged. I once happily paid a small monthly premium for full online access to the New York Times, but lo and behold, the Times is now available online, in full, for free. 

Fear of loss of market share, it seems, has led the managers of the Times and other newspapers to forget that they are selling a product—and that advertising alone will not pay the cost of producing it. Now the Times is reportedly facing the threat of bankruptcy.

The Internet has made information distribution incredibly easy, and cheap. But why should that mean that we consumers won't have to buy what we once paid for willingly, back when it landed on our doorsteps in printed form? (I still get the Sunday Times and San Francisco Chronicle on my doorstep, and I get much more out of the printed version, I might add.) There's no reason at all.

The economics of information are very simple:

1) We need and value information more highly than ever. 

2) We won't have information unless someone pays for it.

3) Advertising alone will not pay for Internet-distributed information.

4) Given the above, consumers of information will have to fill in the gap, and pay for what they now get for free.

The sooner that newspapers start charging subscribers online, the sooner they will be restored to financial health. As both a reader of newspapers and a writer (dependent in part upon newspapers for publicity for my books), I'm convinced that they can't start charging me soon enough.

Bill me. Really.

A Sense of Place

The Narrows, with Staten Island in the foreground and Long Island to the right, 1854

One of the most important things for a biographer—perhaps for any writer—is a sense of place. But this is trickier than it sounds. When writing historical biography, space and time are inseparable.

My previous biography, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, was very, very well received by the people of Missouri, where most of its action takes place. But every now and then I would hear grumbling that I wasn't "from here," that as a New Yorker I couldn't write authoritatively about creekbeds and woods of Clay, Jackson, and Lafayette counties. Maybe the grumblers had a point. But no one alive today, I should point out, is from the nineteenth century. Missouri today is a very, very different place than it was in 1855 or 1875. I immersed myself in this lost place, trying to build a rich, complex, and complete world.

Naturally I tried to do the same in my forthcoming book, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Here I had the advantage of living in New York (and later San Francisco, another scene of the action, where I now reside). But, after writing Jesse James, I was wary of assuming that I knew nineteenth-century New York just because I lived in the current version. More than that, I realized that a sense of place must extend to more than physical geography. I had to range from colliding ferryboats to genteel Washington Square, from docks and railroad depots to corporate boardrooms. But I also had to recapture the social life of New York's aristocrats, the business culture (or cultures) of bankers and steamboat men, the violent poverty of Five Points and Corlear's Hook. Multiple layers of society overlapped—and some of those layers were themselves divided.

Vanderbilt's life was so far-reaching, I had to try to breathe life into anarchic early San Francisco, provincial and corrupt Washington, D.C., war-torn Nicaragua,  and the stuffy London offices of English investment houses. But trickiest of all was the fact that these places changed dramatically over time. When Vanderbilt first started to pilot a sailboat back and forth across New York Harbor, the city was described by a visitor as "an overgrown seaport village." It was ruled by eighteenth-century landed gentry. By the time he died, a million people crammed onto Manhattan, home to factories, gasworks, the nation's leading stock exchange and biggest banks, not to mention the hemisphere's largest railroad depot, Vanderbilt's own Grand Central. Society and culture were transformed over that same period, in part due to Vanderbilt's own efforts.

So I've done my best to create a sense of place that seems true, yet incorporates these complexities and changes. Whether I succeeded or failed will determine much of the value of my book.

Now as Leading Man

Loyal readers of this blog will note that I've retired from punditry to devote my posts to my actual profession: biography. Hopefully my ideas about how to write biography will be more interesting than my views on tax policy.

There's a general issue in biography writing that came up when I tried to get a grip on the personality of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the subject of my forthcoming book. In virtually every historical or biographical account, the Commodore (as he was known) comes across as relentlessly consistent, even monotonously so. He is depicted as crude, cruel, and boorish, a man of force and not much else. Inevitably, I found him to be much more complex.

Now, there are factual roots to some of these accounts. It took decades for genteel New York to accept him as a social equal—though they did, in time. He could be incredibly ruthless when locked in combat. He was remorselessly competitive, in his personal life as well as profession. But all this is only part of the picture. There is abundant evidence that he experienced doubts, fear, love, loss, and loneliness. Even in business, he was true to his word and practiced patient diplomacy. He was famous for exacting revenge, but he also consistently forgave his rivals (once they admitted defeat, that is). In short, he was a three-dimensional figure.

Am I a genius for figuring this out? I don't think so—and if I was a genius, I think I would know it. So why have writers depicted Vanderbilt so shallowly? Indeed, why have they been so willing to believe stories that are entirely without basis? Most descriptions of the Commodore uncritically recite utterly apocryphal tales. Why?

I think the answer is that he has always been a supporting actor in other people's stories. Serious biographies have been written about just about every prominent figure whom Vanderbilt dealt with in his long life, from Daniel Webster to John D. Rockefeller, including Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, and Victoria Woodhull. In many of these cases, Vanderbilt has been treated as an outsized but easily caricatured figure who lends color to the narrative. Why investigate well-worn stories about Vanderbilt, if the writer is focusing on a different figure entirely? Why be skeptical, when he makes for good copy? 

In researching this book, I learned why historians and biographers have left Vanderbilt alone. He lived an incredibly long and active life, yet left no collection of papers to paw through. To write authoritatively about him, then, I had to engage in a lot of creative research, get some lucky breaks, and accept the long, long hours of digging through archives and newspaper accounts in pursuit of an elusive, secretive businessman. But I put in the work, building a portrait of a round, full, complex (yet still outsized) character. Many canonical stories fell away, to be replaced by previously unknown ones; his monotonous consistency evaporated, replaced by a strong personality laced with contradictions. Now, as leading man, Vanderbilt finally came into his own. And the real figure was a lot more interesting than the caricature.

A Matter of Time

In writing about Cornelius Vanderbilt, as when I wrote about Jesse James, I found myself running up against stories that have become fixed as fact in historical and biographical accounts. Someone published them early on, and they've been sanctified with the passage of time. But when I looked into the primary sources, I often found that there was no basis for many of these canonical tales.

I don't accept anything as truth unless I can find some direct evidence for it. For example, with Jesse James I took a fresh look at the story that he spent three years recovering from a gunshot wound he received just at the end of the Civil War. It's possible, I wrote, but unlikely. Most of the evidence I found strongly suggested that he was active and healthy within a year of his injury. That was hard to accept for some readers, who have digested previous biographies.

With Vanderbilt, I ran into this problem quite often—for example, with one of his most famous enemies, Cornelius K. Garrison. Starting in 1853, Garrison was the San Francisco agent for the Accessory Transit Company, the firm Vanderbilt started to carry passengers across Nicaragua during the California gold rush. According to a universally accepted story, Garrison joined with New York financier Charles Morgan to throw Vanderbilt out of the company in 1853. Garrison turned against him again in 1855 when he learned that Vanderbilt had bought back control of Accessory Transit. Garrison, the story goes, convinced William Walker, the American filibuster who had seized Nicaragua, to abolish Accessory Transit and give its rights and property to Garrison and Morgan.

I don't accept this version of events. Even before I found evidence that pointed to an entirely different story, I had problems with the accepted version. It comes down to a question of time. It took an entire month for news to pass between San Francisco and New York—maybe three weeks if everything went exceptionally well. That kind of delay doesn't allow for a man in San Francisco to actively participate in fast-moving business battles in New York. And, when I looked into it, I found no primary-source evidence that Garrison had anything to do with the fight between Vanderbilt and Morgan in 1853.

This matter of time proved even more important in the tale of Garrison, Morgan, Walker, and Vanderbilt in 1855. When I lined up the dates for the crucial events of that year, it was clear that Garrison's negotiations with Walker began before he possibly could have heard of Vanderbilt's stock-market campaign to recapture Accessory Transit. Vanderbilt began to buy large amounts of stock at the end of November; but on December 5, Garrison sent his son to Nicaragua on a steamship to finalize a deal with Walker. It just didn't add up. It was impossible for Garrison to know that Vanderbilt had started to buy Accessory Transit.

So why did Garrison turn against Accessory Transit, a company that paid him well and was controlled (as far as he knew) by his friend and partner, Charles Morgan? The answer is that he was forced into it, and took desperate measures to make sure Morgan would know that Garrison wasn't turning against him. It's a good story, but for the whole truth you'll need to read my book when it comes out in April.

The point is that we biographers and historians need to set aside the habits of thought that we form in the present. Within a decade or so of these events, the telegraph made instant communications possible between the two coasts. Everyone reading this has grown up in a world in which we can immediately reach anyone, anywhere, at almost any time. But this wasn't true in 1853 or 1855—and that simple realization started me on an investigation that discredited a whole set of assumptions about Vanderbilt and his enemies.

A Peek Inside The First Tycoon

On April 21, Alfred A. Knopf will publish my new biography, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Here's a peek inside.

Vanderbilt led one of the longest and most important careers in the annals of American business, but organizing a book about his life was surprisingly easy. He had, in a sense, three careers. Within each of those three, he engaged in a series of set-piece battles. So I arranged the book into three parts, each with six chapters that largely correlate with his business conflicts. I also tried to shape the chapters around the themes that ran through each period of his life. I added an epilogue, acknowledgments, bibliographical essay, endnotes, and a primary-source bibliography, plus six maps and thirty-two pages of illustrations.

Part 1: Captain: 1794–1847 covers the longest period of his life, though it is the shortest segment of the book. During those years, Vanderbilt went from master of a sailboat ferry and small general merchant to become the nation's leading steamboat entrepreneur, during the era of the "transportation revolution." As I show, Vanderbilt also played a major role in New England's early railroads, a largely overlooked aspect of his life. Perhaps most important, he helped shape American economic culture, and inserted himself and his business battles into the debates between Jacksonian Democrats and the Whig Party, in often surprising ways.

Part 2: Commodore: 1858–1860 covers his years as master of oceangoing steamship lines. He operated a transatlantic line to Britain and France, but his most important operations involved gold-rush traffic to California. Most travel and commerce between the two coasts went by ship, connecting by a land crossing over Panama. Vanderbilt attempted to build a canal across Nicaragua (he failed), and started a rival steamship line and transit across that republic. This eventually led him into a conflict with an American "filibuster," or freelance military adventurer, named William Walker, who seized control of Nicaragua in 1855. I offer a new account of this tale, based on sources never cited by historians before. During this era, Vanderbilt became a major player on Wall Street, cooperated closely with successive presidents, and became a major cultural icon.

Part 3: King, 1861–1877 covers the most famous and perhaps most momentous period of his life: his reign as America's railroad monarch. I begin with a fresh look at his role in the Civil War, then offer a new account of his creation of a railroad empire. I look not only at the inner workings of his corporations and business battles (including a fresh version of the infamous Erie War of 1868), but also at how Vanderbilt played an important role in the making of modern economic thinking, and his influence on the new political matrix that emerged with the rise of the corporation and the growth of government power during the Civil War.

Along the way, I try to paint a portrait of Vanderbilt's fascinating private life, including the intrigue among his children and sons-in-law, his complicated relationships with his wives, and the truth about his friendship with Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.

Whatever else Commodore Vanderbilt was, he was never boring.