“Beautifully crafted and fun to read.” —Louis Galambos, The Wall Street Journal

“Nasaw’s research is extraordinary.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Make no mistake: David Nasaw has produced the most thorough, accurate and authoritative biography of Carnegie to date.” —Salon.com

The definitive account of the life of Andrew Carnegie 

Celebrated historian David Nasaw, whom The New York Times Book Review has called "a meticulous researcher and a cool analyst," brings new  life to the story of one of America's most famous and successful  businessmen and philanthropists—in what will prove to be the biography  of the season.

Born of modest origins in Scotland in 1835,  Andrew Carnegie is best known as the founder of Carnegie Steel. His rags  to riches story has never been told as dramatically and vividly as in  Nasaw's new biography. Carnegie, the son of an impoverished linen  weaver, moved to Pittsburgh at the age of thirteen. The embodiment of  the American dream, he pulled himself up from bobbin boy in a cotton  factory to become the richest man in the world. He spent the rest of his  life giving away the fortune he had accumulated and crusading for  international peace. For all that he accomplished and came to represent  to the American public—a wildly successful businessman and capitalist, a  self-educated writer, peace activist, philanthropist, man of letters,  lover of culture, and unabashed enthusiast for American democracy and  capitalism—Carnegie has remained, to this day, an enigma.

Nasaw  explains how Carnegie made his early fortune and what prompted him to  give it all away, how he was drawn into the campaign first against  American involvement in the Spanish-American War and then for  international peace, and how he used his friendships with presidents and  prime ministers to try to pull the world back from the brink of  disaster. With a trove of new material—unpublished chapters of  Carnegie's Autobiography; personal letters between Carnegie and his  future wife, Louise, and other family members; his prenuptial agreement;  diaries of family and close friends; his applications for citizenship;  his extensive correspondence with Henry Clay Frick; and dozens of  private letters to and from presidents Grant, Cleveland, McKinley,  Roosevelt, and British prime ministers Gladstone and Balfour, as well as  friends Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and Mark Twain—Nasaw  brilliantly plumbs the core of this facinating and complex man, deftly  placing his life in cultural and political context as only a master  storyteller can.