Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

The New York Times bestselling and NPR Best Book of the Year history of a legendary American family from the #1 New York Times bestselling authors of Vanderbilt.“A must-read. . . . Cooper and Howe dig into one of the United States’ most influential families and a parable of capitalism, commerce, and greed that established an American way of life.” — Entertainment Weekly

The story of the Astors is an extraordinary but true tale of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention—and of cunning, determination, hard work, hubris, infighting, and greed. One of the wealthiest men to have ever lived, John Jacob Astor arrived in New York in 1783 and built a fortune through a ruthless expansion of his beaver-trapping business, which he grew into an empire through real estate that enriched him at the expense of Manhattan’s poorest residents. In later generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New York society—Caroline  Schermerhorn Astor essentially invented it—and got into the hospitality business with the legendary Waldorf-Astoria hotel, among others.Yet for all their unimaginable success, the Astors also endured crushing tragedy and reversals of fortune. John Jacob IV perished in the Titanic disaster, its most famous victim. His cousin William Waldorf Astor renounced the United States. Rifts would split siblings and pit cousins against one another, legal battles would create irreparable divides, and mansions would be built and razed, or fall into disrepair. By 2009, when Brooke Astor’s son was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother—who had herself married into the family for money—the Astor dynasty was effectively over.In this unconventional, page-turning historical biography, featuring black-and-white and color photographs, Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe chronicle the lives of the Astors and offer a window onto the making of America itself.

About the Author

Anderson Cooper is an anchor at CNN and a correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes. He has won twenty Emmys and numerous other major journalism awards. Cooper is the author of the New York Times bestseller Astor (with Katherine Howe) and three number one New York Times bestsellers: The Rainbow Comes and Goes, Dispatches from the Edge, and Vanderbilt (with Katherine Howe). He lives in New York with his two sons.Katherine Howe is a novelist and a historian of America. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, The House of Velvet and Glass, and (with Anderson Cooper)Vanderbilt and Astor; the young adult novels Conversion and The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen; and she was the editor of The Penguin Book of Witches. She lives with her family in New England.