The Great Pierpont Morgan

New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. x, [2], 306, [2] pages. Frontis illustration. Sources and Obligations. Index. Personal bookplate with name blacked out inside front cover. DJ has some wear, soiling, tears, and chips. Frederick Lewis Allen (July 5, 1890 - February 13, 1954) was the editor of Harper's Magazine and also notable as an American historian of the first half of the twentieth century. Allen's popularity coincided with increased interest in history among the book-buying public of the 1920s and 1930s. His most famous book was the enormously popular Only Yesterday (1931), which chronicled American life in the 1920s. Since Yesterday (1940), a sort of sequel that covered the Depression of the 1930s, was also a bestseller. Derived from a Kirkus review: The man who crystallized the flaming twenties in Only Yesterday has drawn an unforgettable portrait of a man who was a symbol of an earlier- but equally sensational-era, J.P. Morgan. Morgan emerges as a giant in his time. This is primarily a portrait of the man who brought American industry out of the buccaneering period into a period of cooperation. Allen shows how vital a factor this step was to the orderly growth of American business, banking, industry, etc. The tracing of the story gives one a sense of being in on a great panel of America's business history, as the railroads become constructive factors, as the United States Steel was born, as American banking became a part of a great international network. With the accession of Theodore Roosevelt, the pressure was on. Some said it was the Pujo Committee investigation which killed him- though the findings never shook his confidence in his way being right. A rewarding biography of a symbol of his times.