New York Times bestselling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times
bestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary
American dynasty?his mother's family the Vanderbilts. One of the Washington Post's Notable
Works of Nonfiction of 2021 When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his
father's small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth
century no one could have imagined that one day he would through ruthlessness cunning and a
pathological desire for money build two empires?one in shipping and another in railroads?that
would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs
after his death in 1877 sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. Though his son
Billy doubled the money left by ?the Commodore ? subsequent generations competed to find new
and ever more extraordinary ways of spending it. By 2018 when the last Vanderbilt was forced
out of The Breakers?the seventy-room summer estate in Newport Rhode Island that Cornelius's
grandson and namesake had built?the family would have been unrecognizable to the tycoon who
started it all. Now the Commodore's great-great-great-grandson Anderson Cooper joins with
historian Katherine Howe to explore the story of his legendary family and their outsized
influence. Cooper and Howe breathe life into the ancestors who built the family's empire
basked in the Commodore's wealth hosted lavish galas and became synonymous with unfettered
American capitalism and high society. Moving from the hardscrabble wharves of old Manhattan to
the lavish drawing rooms of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue from the ornate summer palaces of Newport
to the courts of Europe and all the way to modern-day New York Cooper and Howe wryly recount
the triumphs and tragedies of an American dynasty unlike any other. Written with a unique
insider's viewpoint this is a rollicking quintessentially American history as remarkable as
the family it so vividly captures.
