When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

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

Author: Justin Kaplan
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 07/01/2007
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780452288584
ISBN10: 0452288584
BISAC Categories:
- History | United States | State & Local | Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD,
- History | United States | 19th Century

About the Author
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.