WHITNEY FATHER, WHITNEY HEIRESS: Two Generations Of One Of America's Richest Families

tan & olive green 1/2 cloth hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. contents free of markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. 1cm tear at spine top, not price clipped. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first edition. first printing (#1 in # line). xiii+518p. 70 b&w photo illustrations. notes. index. biography. american history. journalism. history of china. communism.politics. american international corporation. ~ Pulitzer Prize winning biographer W. A. Swanberg surpasses even the finest of his previous work in this towering narrative of two generations of one of America's wealthiest families. The story of William Collins Whitney and his daughter Dorothy, of his wife Flora Payne and Dorothy's husband Willard Straight, it is a story of love and money, of idealism and corruption, of ambition and untimely death, that ranges from the Gilded Age to the end of World War I. William Collins Whitney was born in rural Massachusetts in 1841 of estimable lineage but slender fortune. Educated at Yale, charming, and with a calm authority even in his youth, he seemed destined to a brilliant future. His marriage to Flora Payne, the vivacious though not truly beautiful Cleveland heiress, could only have appeared to enhance his prospects. Dividing his time between Washington and New York, Whitney abandoned the road to the White House to make a fortune of his own, while trying to accommodate Flora's social ambitions in a day when Mrs. Astor was queen of the "400" and "parvenus" like the Vanderbilts were spending millions to storm the gates. Whitney, the charmer, the mediator, the consummate politician and a pivotal force in Tammany and the national Democratic party, made his fortune by methods so subtle that they remained undiscovered in his lifetime. But he was not to escape tragedy. His daughter Dorothy, an heiress to millions, was an orphan at seventeen. A lover of dances and society, but with a social conscience lacking in her parents, she fell in love, while touring China, with Willard Dickerman Straight. Although negotiating enormous banking transactions in Peking and serving as advisor to railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, who was attempting to create a round~the~world transportation system by hooking up with the Trans~Siberian Railway, Straight had neither social standing nor money. Dorothy's family was horrified. She had rejected dozens of suitors who had both. But Straight was handsome and gifted and, like Dorothy, had political and social ideals. She married him and their marriage was touching in its closeness. Persisting in their political and social concern, they were founders of The New Republic, and Dorothy was instrumental in starting The New School for Social Research. But their marriage, too, would be cut short. Brimming with life, Whitney Father, Whitney Heiress is a rich, sweeping saga of a family, of two marriages, of two men and two women, and of the evolution of political and social thought that the two generations represent. But most of all it is the story of four complex people, whose dreams, loves, aspirations, and grief become the reader's own.…