Golden Fleece: The American Adventures of a Fortune Hunting Earl

An impoverished English earl sails for New York with a single mission: to fleece an American heiress. Lord Frothingham arrives bearing aristocratic credentials and empty pockets, ready to barter his ancient name for the fortune he desperately needs to maintain his crumbling estate. But American wealth has its own rules, and the heiresses of Fifth Avenue prove harder to charm than the debutantes of London. David Graham Phillips skewers the transatlantic marriage market with acid precision, revealing the grotesque theater where old titles and new money negotiate their uneasy exchange. What begins as cynical calculation begins to fray at the edges when genuine feeling enters the equation. A biting social satire from the age of muckraking that exposes how love becomes just another commodity on the market, and how the supposedly immutable boundaries of class dissolve the moment enough currency is involved.