TJS: I worked on it for more than six years. Q:How long have you been working on this book and what kind of research went into it?

His was a dramatic life played out on an enormous stage.

Vanderbilt was central to the rise of the corporation, the emergence of Wall Street, and the birth of big business. And like Jesse James, Vanderbilt opened a window on the making of modern America. Like Jesse James, Vanderbilt has not been the subject of much serious research. He courted physical danger, fought high-stakes financial battles, and always set the terms of his existence. Like Jesse James, Vanderbilt was man of action-decisive, dramatic, and always interesting. Stiles: I was drawn by who he was as a person, the lack of writing about him, and the historical themes that defined his life. What drew you to Cornelius Vanderbilt as your next subject? Question: Your last book was a biography of Jesse James. The First Tycoon is the exhilarating story of a man and a nation maturing together: the powerful account of a man whose life was as epic and complex as American history itself.

And he was a father who struggled with a gambling-addicted son, a husband who was loving yet abusive, and, finally, an old man who was obsessed with contacting the dead. He was an unschooled fistfighter who came to command the respect of New York’s social elite. He was a visionary who pioneered business models. Vanderbilt, Stiles shows, embraced the philosophy of the Jacksonian Democrats and withstood attacks by his conservative enemies for being too competitive. It is a sweeping, fast-moving epic, and a complex portrait of the great man. In The First Tycoon, Stiles offers the first complete, authoritative biography of this titan, and the first comprehensive account of the Commodore’s personal life. Stiles elegantly argues, Vanderbilt did more than perhaps any other individual to create the economic world we live in today. We see Vanderbilt help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation-in fact, as T. Lincoln consulted him on steamship strategy during the Civil War Jay Gould was first his uneasy ally and then sworn enemy and Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States, was his spiritual counselor. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire. A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism.įounder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt is an American icon.

The first tycoon cornelius vanderbilt