The Spenders: A Tale of the Third Generation
1902
When Daniel J. Bines dies suddenly in his private railroad car at Kaslo Junction, no one can find either his elderly father or his Harvard-educated son to tell them. Old Peter Bines is somewhere in the Sierra Nevada mountains, living the lonely life of a prospector. His grandson Percival is on the East Coast, two years out of Harvard and deep into his first season of fashionable pursuit. What follows is a sharp, often bitter examination of what it means to inherit money in America. Wilson dissects the collision between rugged Western individualism and the cultivated Eastern elite with wit that cuts both ways. The old man who dug his fortune from the earth confronts a grandson who has never known a day of want, and neither can quite understand the other. It's a novel about the American Dream at the turn of a century, when the frontier was closing and the question became: what do you do with what your father built? For readers who appreciate early American naturalism with an edge of social satire, this is a forgotten gem that feels surprisingly contemporary.
