When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan - ISBN: 9780452288584
Paperback
Gilded Age titans clash, building opulent hotels and transforming New York.

When the Astors Owned New York

Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

$37.31

  • Paperback

    224 pages

  • Release Date

    26 June 2007

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Summary

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 a…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780452288584
ISBN-10:0452288584
Author:Justin Kaplan
Publisher:Penguin Putnam Inc
Imprint:Penguin USA
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:224
Release Date:26 June 2007
Weight:210g
Dimensions:212mm x 140mm x 13mm
What They're Saying

Critics Review

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)

About The Author

Justin Kaplan

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.

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