Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

Publisher's Signed First Edition by Anderson Cooper on a blank page preceding the title page CNN anchor and New York Times bestselling author Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty—his mother’s family, the Vanderbilts.Few names are as synonymous with wealth and glamour as “Vanderbilt.”When Cornelius Vanderbilt, the teenaged son of a ferryman in New York Harbor who was born at the end of the eighteenth century, decided to go into business on his own, few would have believed that within six decades he would epitomize American wealth, magnate of a shipping and railroad empire that made him the richest man in the country. In the wake of his death in 1877, Cornelius’s heirs bitterly fought over his estate, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. The generations of Vanderbilts who followed lived lives of unimaginable excess, steeped in tides of success and failure.