Description
The railroad king who rebuilt America. Maury Klein’s The Life and Legend of E.H. Harriman is the biography of the most powerful businessman of his age: the man who took over the bankrupt Union Pacific and made it the greatest railroad in the world — then took on J.P. Morgan himself and won.
Klein — the great railroad historian — writes with authority and drama: the stock corners, the empire-building, the conservation legacy (Harriman saved forests too). Harriman’s life is the Gilded Age in miniature: ruthless, visionary, and immense, played out along 10,000 miles of track.
The essential railroad biography: magisterial and gripping. For American history lovers: the tycoon who moved the country — literally. Klein’s Harriman is history on an epic scale: the man, the machine, the nation he moved. Railroad buffs, rejoice — this is the one. Union Pacific’s savior, Morgan’s rival, America’s builder: Harriman’s story is the railroad age in full. Klein is the master of it.
The Life and Legend of E. H. Harriman
The Life and Legend of E. H. Harriman by Maury Klein is the first in-depth biography in more than seventy-five years of one of the most powerful — and most controversial — figures of the railroad age.
To Americans living in the early twentieth century, E. H. Harriman was as familiar a name as J. P. Morgan. The son of an Episcopal clergyman, he rose from a Wall Street office boy to master of the Union Pacific, which he rebuilt into one of the great railroads of the world. He went on to control the Southern Pacific, battled for the Northern Pacific in one of the fiercest corporate fights in American history, and clashed with President Theodore Roosevelt over the power of the trusts.
Klein, a respected historian of American business, separates the man from the myth: the driven, secretive titan who also funded the famous Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899 and reshaped the American West. Richly detailed and authoritative, this is the definitive portrait of a legend of the Gilded Age.
Essential reading for students of American business history, railroads, and the age of the great tycoons.
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