Table of Contents

Preface
Prologue: A Family in History

PART ONE
In the Shadow of His Father, 1855–1900

1. The Patriarch Presides: Father and Sons, 1855–73
2. The Family in Business: Boys and Banks, 1873–87
3. The “Mellon System” Inaugurated: “My Brother and I,” 1887–98
4. The Great Leap Forward: Mergers and Matrimony, 1898–1900

PART TWO
Wealth’s Triumphs, Fortune’s Travails, 1900–1921

5. The Transition Completed: Family Man and Venture Capitalist, 1901–1907
6. The First Scandal: Separation and Divorce, 1907–12
7. Life Goes On: Business (Almost) as Usual, 1907–14
8. New Careers for Old: Single Parent, Aging Plutocrat, Emerging Politician, 1914–21

PART THREE
The Rise and Fall of a Public Man, 1921–33

9. Hard Times with Harding: Political Realities, Getting Started, Settling In, 1921–23
10. Better Years with Coolidge: Mellonizing America, Aggrandizing Himself, 1923–26
11. Carrying On with Hoover: Great Ideas to Great Crash, 1927–29
12. Triumphs amid Troubles: Fortune’s Zenith, Russian Pictures, Pittsburgh Woes, 1929–31
13. “The Man Who Stayed Too Long”: Depression, Departure, London and Back, 1931–33

PART FOUR
Old Man, New Deal, 1933–37

14. His World Turned Upside Down: An Unhappy Homecoming, 1933–34
15. The Second Scandal: The “Tax Trial” and the National Gallery of Art, 1933–36
16. Beginnings and Endings: The Gallery Established, a Life in Its Fullness, 1936–37

Epilogue: A Fortune in History
Appendix: The Mellon Family
A Note on Sources
Abbreviations for Notes
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

About the Author

David Cannadine was born in Birmingham in 1950 and educated at the Cambridge, Oxford, and Princeton. He is the editor and author of many acclaimed books, including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, which won the Lionel Trilling Prize and the Governors' Award; Aspects of Aristocracy; G. M. Trevelyan; The Pleasures of the Past; History in Our Time; and Class in Britain. He has taught at Cambridge and Columbia and is now the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

Reviews

“Absorbing. . . . Cannadine writes like a storyteller, and the book often reads as compulsively as one of those immense fictional sagas that weigh down the bestseller lists. Sin and redemption are always close to the center of those family tales, and so they are in Mellon.”
—Russell Baker, The New York Review of Books

“A fascinating biography. . . . A sprawling work for a sprawling life.”
—Roger Lowenstein, The New York Times

“A commanding biography, unsparing in revelation, lively in its writing, rigorous in its scholarship, astute in its judgments, and altogether a major contribution to American history.”
—Harold Evans, author of The American Century and They Made America

"Absorbing. . . . Cannadine writes like a storyteller, and the book often reads as compulsively as one of those immense fictional sagas that weigh down the bestseller lists. Sin and redemption are always close to the center of those family tales, and so they are in Mellon."
-Russell Baker, The New York Review of Books

"A fascinating biography. . . . A sprawling work for a sprawling life."
-Roger Lowenstein, The New York Times

"A commanding biography, unsparing in revelation, lively in its writing, rigorous in its scholarship, astute in its judgments, and altogether a major contribution to American history."
-Harold Evans, author of The American Century and They Made America