This newest book by Pulitzer Prize winner Kaplan is a sparkling combination of biography, social history, architectural appreciation, and pure pleasure, as he looks at the Astor familys dynasty and its contributions to the city of New York.
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 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 pleasure
“Mr. Kaplan is a companionable writer, and his well-turned sentences are a delight to read. (The New York Observer)”
A gem of a book . . . No one since [Henry] James has written with such ease and grace about the era of excess as Kaplan. (Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters)
Mr. Kaplan, a dazzling stylist, is perfectly suited to his subject: what Henry James lovingly called æhotel civilizationæ . . . [A] splendid book about a bygone age that has not quite gone away. (The New York Sun)
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.
This newest book by Pulitzer Prize winner Justin Kaplan is a sparkling combination of biography, social history, architectural appreciation, and pure pleasure Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, two heirs of arch-capitalist John Jacob Astor battled with each other for social primacy. William Waldorf Astor (born 1848) and his cousin John Jacob Astor IV (born 1864) led incomparably privileged lives in the blaze of public attention. Novelist, sportsman, and inventor, John Jacob went down with the "Titanic," after turbulent marital adventures and service in the Spanish-American War. Collector of art, antiquities, and stately homes, William Waldorf became a British subject and acquired the title of Viscount Astor. In New York during the 1890s and after, the two feuding Astors built monumental grand hotels, chief among them the original Waldorf-Astoria on lower Fifth Avenue. The Astor hotels transformed social behavior. Home of the chafing dish and the velvet rope, the Waldorf-Astoria drew the rich, famous, and fashionable. It was the setting for the most notorious society event of the era -- a costume extravaganza put on by its hosts during a time of widespread need and unemployment. The celebrity-packed lobbies, public rooms, lavish suites, and exclusive restaurants of the grand hotels became distinctive theaters of modern life.
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