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Published by Garrett County Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
Chicago means money. Meet the families who made it.
Swift. Armour. Pullman. Pritzker. Wilson. Wrigley. Ward. MacArthur. Sears. Morton, as in salt. Walgreen, as in drugstore. Nielsen, as in television ratings. McNally, as in atlas. The Chicago phonebook reads like a glossary of American business, because Chicago, as the saying went, "has a beautiful sound, because Chicago means money."
The Fortune Builders is the group biography of the families behind those names: the meatpackers, mail-order kings, railcar barons, gum makers, and salt merchants who turned a swamp town into the capital of the American century. Dramatic rises, dynastic feuds, ballroom rivalries, and the kind of tasty social gossip that only old money produces.
Essential reading for fans of Gilded Age and Robber Baron history, Chicago natives and transplants, students of American industrial dynasties, and anyone who has ever wondered who put their name on the building.
Swift. Armour. Pullman. Pritzker. Wilson. Wrigley. Ward. MacArthur. Sears. Morton, as in salt. Walgreen, as in drugstore. Nielsen, as in television ratings. McNally, as in atlas. The Chicago phonebook reads like a glossary of American business, because Chicago, as the saying went, "has a beautiful sound, because Chicago means money."
The Fortune Builders is the group biography of the families behind those names: the meatpackers, mail-order kings, railcar barons, gum makers, and salt merchants who turned a swamp town into the capital of the American century. Dramatic rises, dynastic feuds, ballroom rivalries, and the kind of tasty social gossip that only old money produces.
Essential reading for fans of Gilded Age and Robber Baron history, Chicago natives and transplants, students of American industrial dynasties, and anyone who has ever wondered who put their name on the building.
Why We Love It
We love The Fortune Builders because nobody else has written it. There are histories of the meatpacking industry, biographies of Marshall Field, individual dynasty books about the Pritzkers or the Wrigleys. There is no other volume that gathers the whole Chicago founding-family roster into a single intertwined social world and tells their stories together. Edwin Darby spent nearly forty years inside Chicago business as financial editor of the Sun-Times, close enough to the third and fourth generations of these families to write about them with the candor of someone who had been in the room. We are proud to keep the book in print because the Gilded Age is having a cultural moment, because Chicago has never had a better single-volume guide to its founding class, and because there is no substitute for a chronicler who actually knew the people on the page.
Product Details
- Publisher: Garrett County Press (November 6, 2011)
- Length: 267 pages
- ISBN13: 9781891053177
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