Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made

This is a Gilded Age portrait of American ambition, written when the nation's richest men were still alive to be studied. McCabe profiles self-made magnates, the merchants, railroad builders, and industrialists who transformed a young republic into an economic powerhouse. But this isn't mere hagiography. The preface explicitly argues that "great fortunes" means achievement in any field, not just bank accounts, setting up biographies that examine character, strategy, and sometimes moral ambiguity. These are stories of immigrant peddlers who became banking giants, of men who gambled everything on railroads across uncharted territory, of the particular American alchemy that turned hard work into historic wealth. The book captures a moment when the rules of success were still being written, and when the gap between poverty and power was, paradoxically, narrower than it would ever be again. For modern readers, it serves as both a fascinating window into the origins of American wealth mythology and an unsettling reminder that every fortune has a human story behind it.