In this marvelous anecdotal history, Justin Kaplan––Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain––vividly brings to life a grand story from the glittering Gilded Age.
Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, cousins John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor vied for primacy in New York society, producing the grandest hotels ever seen in a marriage of ostentation and efficiency that transformed American social behavior.
Kaplan exposes it all in exquisite detail, taking readers from the 1890s to the Roaring Twenties in a combination of biography, history, architectural appreciation, and pure reading pleasure
Justin Kaplan was an editor, biographer, and author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman: A Life, among other books. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2014.
Table of Contents
Prologue 3 The House of Astor 9 Town Topics 27 Inventor and Novelist 55 Palaces for the People 67 "A New Thing Under the Sun" 81 After the Ball Was Over 99 Aladdin 112 "Mine! All Mine!" 139 Baron Astor of Hever Castle 160 End of the Line 175 Acknowledgment 183 Sources 185 Index 189
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
A gem of a book . . . No one since [Henry] James has written with such ease and grace about the era of excess as Kaplan. (Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters)
Mr. Kaplan, a dazzling stylist, is perfectly suited to his subject: what Henry James lovingly called æhotel civilizationæ . . . [A] splendid book about a bygone age that has not quite gone away. (The New York Sun)
author of The Peabody Sisters Megan Marshall
A gem of a book ... No one since [Henry] James has written with such ease and grace about the era of excess as Kaplan. (Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters)
