The First Tycoon

Cornelius Vanderbilt lived from 1794 to 1877, from Washington's presidency to the Gilded Age he did as much as anyone to create, and The First Tycoon is the full biography his scale demanded. T.J. Stiles spent seven years in the archives to write it, and the research shows in the book's central claim: Vanderbilt was not merely the richest American of his century but the man who, more than any other single figure, invented the modern corporation as a thing readers would recognize, an entity abstracted from its owners, commanding capital beyond any individual fortune, and answerable mostly to itself. The life supplies narrative as extravagant as the thesis. The Staten Island ferry boy builds a steamboat empire by slashing fares and outlasting every rival; he runs the transit route across Nicaragua during the gold rush and personally out maneuvers the filibuster William Walker; in his seventies, when most careers end, he pivots wholesale into railroads, assembles the New York Central, wins and loses the notorious Erie War against Gould and Fisk, and in the panic of 1873 stands almost alone in continuing to build, throwing up Grand Central Depot while the economy burned. Stiles neither prosecutes nor worships him, treating the Commodore's ruthlessness, his markets rigged and legislatures bought, as the practices of a world whose rules he was writing as he went. The book won the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and it stands as the definitive Vanderbilt and one of the great American business biographies.