The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
by T. J. Stiles
Summary
Cornelius Vanderbilt was born on Staten Island while George Washington was president and died in 1877 as the richest man in America. He began with a small boat ferrying produce across New York harbor, moved into steamships, broke the monopolies that controlled them, and then did the same to the railroads.
Stiles is interested in something larger than a rags to riches story, and it is the reason the book runs past seven hundred pages. Vanderbilt lived through the period in which the American economy was invented: when the corporation went from a chartered privilege to an ordinary instrument, when a national market came into being, and when the idea that a private person could command more resources than a state first became real. Vanderbilt did not just profit from that shift. He caused a great deal of it.
The man himself is not softened. He was ruthless in business, appalling to his family, barely literate in the conventional sense and formidably intelligent. Stiles gives you the cruelty without editorializing and lets the scale of the achievement sit next to it.
It is long, and the middle third on railroad consolidation is heavy going if corporate manoeuvring does not interest you. Skim it if you must; everything around it moves quickly, and Stiles is a genuinely good narrative writer whenever there is a fight to describe, which is often.
If you want to understand how modern American capitalism actually came about rather than how it is usually described, this is the book to read. It is also a useful corrective to the idea that the great fortunes were built quietly.
Historical Context & Significance
The First Tycoon was published by Knopf in April 2009 and won both the National Book Award for Nonfiction that year and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2010, a double that very few books achieve. The board honored it in Biography for 2010, a year after it took the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
The timing shaped its reception. It arrived in the year after the financial crisis, when the question of how American capitalism had been built and whom it had been built for was unusually live, and reviewers repeatedly read Vanderbilt's career against the present. The book's central claim, that Vanderbilt did more than almost any individual to bring modern capitalism into being, was received as an argument about the present as much as a judgment about the nineteenth century.
It has since become the standard life, displacing a century of more admiring and considerably less documented accounts written closer to the family.