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by Justin Kaplan (Author)
In this marvelous anecdotal history, Justin Kaplan--Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain--vividly brings to life a grand story from the glittering Gilded Age.
Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, cousins John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor lived incomparably privileged lives. For three decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, they vied for primacy in New York society, producing the grandest hotels ever seen in a marriage of ostentation and efficiency that transformed American social behavior. Kaplan exposes it all in exquisite detail, taking readers from the 1890s to the Roaring Twenties in a combination of biography, history, architectural appreciation, and pure reading pleasureAuthor Biography
Justin Kaplan was an editor, biographer, and author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman: A Life, among other books. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2014.
Number of Pages: 224
Dimensions: 0.6 x 8.3 x 5.4 IN
Publication Date: July 01, 2007
