American Rascal: How Jay Gould Built Wall Street’s Biggest Fortune

Even though his name is not as well-known as Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Stanford, or other robber barons of the 19th Century, Jay Gould is often considered the first robber baron and one of the most notorious as he stepped over people, crushed his enemies and built a massive fortune. Though in this new biography, you will not really learn about the truly unscrupulous ways Gould built his fortune as the biography is a largely glowing account of Gould’s life and times. It seems that nothing stood in the way of Gould and his money except for morality and people condemning him in newspapers and pamphlets. The role of the biographer is to get into the reason why we should care about reading this person and what made them tick. This biography really does not delve too deeply into the mind of Gould, which is often difficult because there is little correspondence or notes Gould left behind after he died. This is a fairly flattering portrait of a man condemned as one of the worst species of capitalism and everything that is wrong with capitalism.