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 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 effi...