The website Big Think has posted an interview in which I discuss the art of writing biography, research, the character of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the fraught question of the uses of history for the present.
I've had a very busy spring, with Vintage's publication of the paperback edition of The First Tycoon and requests for public speaking. So allow me to direct your attention to my Media Center page on this website. There I'm posting audio and video clips of my public appearances.
Most recently, I appeared at the Printer's Row Lit Fest in Chicago. Even though I was born in the country, I love great cities, and Chicago is one of the greatest. My only regret is that I wasn't able to stay in town longer, and enjoy the festival (and the rest of the town) for myself.
I've been neglectful of late, when it comes to updating this blog. I do have a defense: I've been on the road, both for business and pleasure. In fact, this last Monday I returned home to San Francisco after two weeks away, a trip that began with the Pulitzer ceremony at Columbia University in New York.
As I've mentioned before, the Pulitzer and National Book Award really have filled me with a renewed sense of humility. I'm in daunting company. And, as I often say, I don't kid myself that I was the only possible choice—far from it. But it's also really a wonderful thing, especially because it's a kind of ratification of my highest hopes for this book: that it would be a work of literature, in some way, as well as scholarship.
The irony, of course, is that the Commodore loathed writing. It has been suggested to me that he was dyslexic, which is quite possible, if impossible to properly diagnose over this span of time. He read well enough, and could write (though he spelled phonetically). Still, he didn't like to write, as he admitted in one letter. He pitched letters that he received into the fire after he read them, and left no collection of papers behind.
Lucky for me that he left a far larger paper trail behind than previous historians and biographers had suspected. Though it didn't seem so lucky when I was five years into the project, with still no end in sight...
Thursday, May 27, 2010, is the 216th birthday of Commodore Vanderbilt. With a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize on my shelf, I can only wish him a happy birthday.
Not that he was an easy man to like. Vanderbilt fought his way from near the very bottom to the absolute top (in fact, you could say he invented a new top), and he was nothing if not fierce. He embodied profound conundrums for the American republic, as he both created enormous wealth for his fellow countrymen and pioneered a severely polarized society, amassing power never before seen in private hands.
Yet let's give him due credit: He was truly self-made, earned his pride in himself, and, if ruthless, was also honest, and promoted the interests of the stockholders of his corporations as did no other chief executive of his day (or perhaps ours). As a biographer, it's my duty to follow a balanced approach to my subject, rather than preach a message, using my subject as a mere vehicle for preconceived views. Vanderbilt has suffered far too much of the latter over the decades.
I have another reason to wish the Commodore well. I suspect that his ghost tried to put a stop to my biography early on. In October 2003, when I had been at work on The First Tycoon for a year already, I was a passenger on the Staten Island Ferry boat Andrew Barberi when it crashed.
Let me stress, though, that I don't mean to make light of that event. Eleven people tragically died, amid horror that I was unaware of as I rode on the upper deck, where none were harmed.
They don't allow you to dedicate Pulitzer Prizes, the way you do books. So let me just say, on the 216th anniversary of the Commodore's birth, that I'm honoring the people who didn't make it across New York harbor on that windy day in 2003.
On April 20, Vintage released the paperback edition of The First Tycoon, as shown in the sidebar column of this webpage. That begs the question: What's different about the paperback, compared to the hardcover? Almost as significant: What's the same?
First, what's the same, starting with design and reproduction. When I was preparing The First Tycoon for publication, I selected an unusually large number of illustrations—a total of seventy-nine. Rather than distribute these around the book, I asked that they be reproduced in special inserts. Often an illustrated book offers eight pages of illustrations, in just one insert section. In The First Tycoon, there are two eight-page inserts and one sixteen-page insert.
Why special insert sections? They make the illustrations easier to find, of course, but most important is the reproduction quality they offer. They are on heavier stock, which allows for sharper images and prevents bleed-through, where you can see the photo on the reverse page.
Normally Vintage reproduces these inserts in paperbacks on standard-stock paper. Don't get me wrong: Vintage does a very good job of it. But the publisher agreed, on my request, to print them on the heavier stock for the paperback of The First Tycoon, to provide higher quality reproduction, just as in the hardcover. And, of course, the paperback features the same maps and outstanding interior design as the hardcover. The front cover is slightly different, but the beautiful spine from the hardcover appears on the paperback as well.
That's what's the same. What's different? Even though I'm proud of the first edition of my book, as a particularly clean product, there were still a few minor errors here and there. These were cleaned up even before the paperback, in subsequent printings of the hardcover. But there is one case where I made a change for the paperback that may be worth further discussion.
If you compare pages 458 and 459 of the hardcover and paperback editions, you will note that two paragraphs have been switched. This is in a description of the height of the stockmarket battle known as the Erie War, when Vanderbilt was struggling in 1868 to corner the market in Erie Railway stock. His enemies (Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, and Jim Fisk, among others) created new stock that was frankly unlawful, and dumped it on the market to defeat the corner, which Vanderbilt would have successfully carried through otherwise.
I was discussing this episode with another historian, who pointed out that March 10 was the critical day, in which it became clear that there was new stock being manufactured, and on which the Erie people (Drew, etc.) carried out a "lock-up," withdrawing a massive amount of money from bank accounts in order to cause a freeze-up of credit on Wall Street. These two things effectively stopped the trading in Erie on the stock exchange.
In the hardcover, I mention March 10, and then go on to describe Vanderbilt as continuing to buy the stock. Why? Because I didn't want to get too far down into the weeds of this affair. Other historians, notably Maury Klein and John Steele Gordon, have described the day-by-day details very well, and I saw no need to describe every single maneuver in extreme close-up. After my conversation with the other historian, though, I decided my general description was just a bit too general in this case, since I specifically mentioned that date of March 10.
By switching the paragraph that starts "But Vanderbilt continued to buy" so it appears before my mention of the crisis of March 10, it's clearer that that date marked a turning point, in which the battle on Wall Street screeched to a halt, and the conflict shifted almost entirely to the courts and legislature.
Reading the accounts through, it's clear in both cases that I am offering a general description of the events of those days, rather than a day-by-day, hour-by-hour narrative. Because of that, the original version is not exactly wrong. However, that small change made it more precise for the paperback. And precision matters a great deal to me.
Thanks to the Pulitzer Prize, the paperback of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt will be published early—on April 20, in fact. As of this writing, that's only five days away.
For those of you who want to acquire a copy of the gorgeous hardcover, time is running out. It will be unobtainable before long. (Excuse me for calling my own book "gorgeous," but I had nothing to do with the design and production quality. Well done, Knopf.)
For those of you holding onto your money, waiting for the paperback, your long wait is about to end, almost exactly one year after hardcover publication.
Where should you buy? I encourage you to seek out your local independent bookseller. Reserve a copy! Why not Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Borders, you ask? I am not against any of these retailers. I think the world of books needs them all. But if I'm not anti-Amazon or anti-chain, I am definitely pro-independent. The independent neighborhood bookseller is where readers can interact with well-informed staff, get intelligent recommendations, and discover new and unknown writers. Independents are where writers actually meet readers in face-to-face appearances.
I say this not so much for my sake, since the prizes I've been honored with guarantee that readers can find my books, wherever they shop. Rather, I'm speaking for the legions of writers who deserve an audience, and are waiting to break out. And when they do break out, it's usually through independent bookstores—an essential part of the culture of the written word.
So if you order from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Borders, you won't get a complaint from me. Buying books is good, no matter where. But if you support your local independent bookstore, then consider this a pat on the back. Well done.
Oh, and thanks again to Mr. Pulitzer. Your forethought, sir, has had a big effect on my life.
To say that I am honored is to indulge in extreme understatement. Frankly, I'm a very lucky man. The First Tycoon previously won the National Book Award for nonfiction, which boggled my mind. I hardly expected it to win the Pulitzer Prize as well. This is not false modesty. Some of our greatest writers have never won either prize, let alone both in one year.
This is not to slight the selection process, either. Winnowing a field down to just one book can be absurdly difficult, even arbitrary at a certain point. Last year saw an array of truly outstanding biographies, from Cheever and Woodrow Wilson (both finalists for the Pulitzer) to Koestler. Both the National Book Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Book Prize jury left my book off their short lists—and there were no mobs in the streets, chanting protests. A writer is never owed a prize, and should never expect one when the field is so crowded with excellence.
What I take from this honor is not a sense that my book is the best one out there. Rather, I feel as if the jury is saying that I succeeded in meeting my ambitions for my book. I've been included in a small group who have won both the NBA and the Pulitzer for the same book. This select bunch includes two writers who have, in many ways, served as models for me: Richard Rhodes and Robert Caro. I admire how they combine literary and scholarly virtues in their work. Their research and analysis is first-rate, but they also craft beautifully written narratives with compelling stories and three-dimensional characters. Frankly, I don't think I write at their level, but I am inspired by their example. Winning the Pulitzer tells me that this kind of writing is still highly valued. And for that I'm grateful—as a writer and a reader.
It's a sad truth that lies live on, and on, and on. And the life of Commodore Vanderbilt has attracted lies in thick, nasty swarms.
One of the most persistent of the false claims about Vanderbilt is also the most recent: That he contracted syphilis, went insane, and died from the disease. This assertion first appeared in a 2007 book that I critique at length in the bibliographical essay in my own The First Tycoon, and that I discuss on my "First Tycoon" page on this website. There is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that Vanderbilt had syphilis, and mountains of evidence that he did not have it. Certainly he never went insane.
Despite my heavily documented debunking of this idea, it has surfaced again. Wendy Burden's new memoir, Dead End Gene Pool, recounting her life as a Vanderbilt descendant, starts off in the prologue by repeating this nonsense—beginning with the very first line, no less. She repeats other false statements from that 2007 book, such as that the glass train-shed roof of Grand Central Depot collapsed on the day Commodore Vanderbilt died, and that he "disinherited" all but one of his children. Not true.
I wish to be fair to Burden. These claims amount to a few brief scene-setting statements in her prologue, and have nothing to do with the personal story she tells in her memoir. But, I'm sorry to say, she unwittingly perpetuates falsehoods that should be expunged for good.
