When the Astors Owned New York

Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

von Justin Kaplan

226 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

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 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

• Reihe: Penguin Publishing Group
• ISBN: 9780452288584
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 26.06.2007
• Größe: 214 x 141 mm
• Verlag: Random House