Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon

Summary

“Wonderfully detailed.…Today’s vilified moguls look like pussycats compared with Hetty.” —Forbes

A biography of the “Witch of Wall Street,” who amassed a fortune of $100 million before women had the right to vote

A full century before Oprah and Martha Stewart became icons of female entrepreneurship, there was Hetty Green, America’s richest woman, who stood alone among the roguish giants of the Gilded Age. The Guinness Book of World Records memorialized her as the World’s Greatest Miser, and, indeed, this unlikely robber baron—who parlayed a comfortable inheritance into a fortune that was worth about 1.6 billion in today’s dollars—was frugal to a fault. But she lived by her own rules, buying and selling real estate and railroads, fighting hard and sometimes dirty, and amassing cash reserves to rival the great banks. In Hetty, Charles Slack reexamines her life and legacy, giving us, at long last, a splendidly “nuanced portrait” (Newsweek) of one of the greatest—and most eccentric—financiers in American history.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.