Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America s First Female Tycoon

Description

A full century before Martha Stewart, Oprah, and Madonna became icons, generations before women swept through Wall Street, and decades before they even had the right to vote, there was Hetty Green, America s richest woman, who stood alone among the roguish giants of the Gilded Age as the first lady of capitalism and is remembered as the Witch of Wall Street.

At the time of her death in 1916, Hetty Green s personal fortune was estimated at $100 million ($1.6 billion today), and the financial empire she built on real estate and railroads rivaled that of Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and some of the nation s biggest banks. Today, Hetty Green ranks near the top of America s list of greatest financiers, in company with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and billionaire-investor Warren Buffett. But in history books she has remained merely a footnote, a miser and an eccentric, whose character flaws and personal choices unjustly overshadowed her remarkable accomplishments on the fierce battlefield of American industry and commerce.

In Hetty, Charles Slack reexamines the life, work, and conflicted legacy of the exceptionally resourceful, ruthless, and inimitable woman who turned a comfortable inheritance into a fortune through instinct, courage, cunning, greed, and determination to succeed at a man s game on her own terms: from her childhood in the Quaker community of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where she learned about business by reading financial papers to her father, to the battle over her inheritance that was one of the most controversial legal cases of her time; from her collisions with railroad magnate Collis Huntington to her rescue of New York City from financial ruin.

Looking well beyond the lore and historical prejudices, Charles Slack presents a full portrait of a true American original, a female Citizen Kane who, having turned away from the conventions of her time, as a woman, a wife, a mother, and a mogul, led a life of a different sort, with occasionally tragic results, becoming both a hero and a victim of her era. Above all, it is a story of an uncompromising, larger-than-life, flawed woman who ruled a vast financial empire but was known, simply, as Hetty.