Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen

In this volume of his celebrated series, Elbert Hubbard turns his itinerant gaze toward the titans of commerce who reshaped the modern world. Rather than dry biography, Hubbard offers something more intimate and subversive: he visits the homes of twelve industrialists, from Andrew Carnegie to John J. Astor, from Stephen Girard to J.P. Morgan's contemporaries, and reads their lives in the architecture of their domestic spaces. What furniture did they choose? What art hung on their walls? How did the architect of an empire sleep at night? Hubbard, that irrepressible maverick of the progressive era, combines reporting with philosophy, biography with social commentary. The result is a strange, privileged tour through the mansions of men who held immense power over millions of lives, rendered with Hubbard's characteristic opinionated verve. It is a time capsule of Gilded Age excess and aspiration, but also a meditation on whether environment shapes the exceptional, or whether exceptional men simply impose themselves on whatever surroundings they find.