John D. Rockefeller: The Bookkeeper Who Became America's First Billionaire (American Titans)

He tithed his first sixteen dollars to God—and built the greatest fortune on earth, then gave most of it away. He was the son of a traveling con man and a devout, abandoned Baptist mother, a boy who kept a ledger the way other boys keep a diary and gave God his tenth out of a clerk's first wages. From that seed grew the strangest life of the Gilded Age. By the age of forty he controlled ninety percent of the oil of the United States; by the end he was the first billionaire the world had ever seen; and through all of it he never once doubted that his fortune was a trust placed in his hands by God. John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil into the most complete monopoly in American history—by secret railroad rebates and ruinous price wars, by espionage and the cold absorption of every rival he could reach—and he did it with a serene, unshakable conscience that unnerved his enemies more than any cruelty could have. Ida Tarbell made him the most hated man in America. The Supreme Court broke his empire into thirty-four pieces—and made him richer than any human being alive. Inside this vivid, fast-paced biography you'll discover: How a poor bookkeeper's son rose to control the oil of a continent and become the world's first billionaire The lesson of "Ledger A"—the tithe, the thrift, and the faith that governed him from boyhood to the grave The Cleveland Massacre of 1872 and the secret South Improvement Company scheme that built the empire The rebates, price wars, and espionage that made Standard Oil "the octopus"—and the cheap light it brought the world The invention of the Trust and the modern corporation, run in silence from 26 Broadway Ida Tarbell's landmark exposé and the calm silence with which he met the hatred of a nation The 1911 Supreme Court breakup that only made him richer—and the birth of the first billion-dollar fortune The University of Chicago, the medical institute, the conquest of hookworm, and the great Foundation—and the shadow of Ludlow and the dimes Grounded in the documentary record and told with the pace of a novel, this is the full life of John D. Rockefeller—the pious bookkeeper and the ruthless monopolist fused into one calm, seamless man; the titan who brought cheap light to the poor of the world and ruined those who stood in his way, and who took and gave with the same clear conscience to the end. It sets Ludlow against the Foundation and asks the question he never felt: whether the giving can ever redeem the getting. The essential life of an American titan. The fifteenth volume in the American Titans series: Lives That Shaped a Nation.