The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

“You seem to be the idol of… a crawling swarm of small souls,” Mark Twain wrote in an open letter to Vanderbilt, “who… sing of your unimportant private habits and sayings and doings, as if your millions gave them dignity”

In 1816, a Senate committee found that it was as expensive to move a ton of goods thirty miles overland as it was to bring the same ton across the Atlantic from Europe.

One person cannot move the national economy single-handedly—but no one else kept his hands on the lever for so long or pushed so hard.

he had been able to sell all his assets at full market value at the moment of his death, in January of that year, he would have taken one out of every twenty dollars in circulation, including cash and demand deposits.

“IT IS AS IF WE ALL CARRY in our makeup the effects of accidents that have befallen our ancestors,” writes V. S. Naipaul, “as if we are in many ways programmed before we are born, our lives half outlined for us.”