The Fortune Builders

Chicago means money. Meet the families who made it.

Swift. Armour. Pullman. Pritzker. Wilson. Wrigley. Ward. MacArthur. Sears. Morton, as in salt. Walgreen, as in drugstore. Nielsen, as in television ratings. McNally, as in atlas. The Chicago phonebook reads like a glossary of American business, because Chicago, as the saying went, "has a beautiful sound, because Chicago means money."

The Fortune Builders is the group biography of the families behind those names: the meatpackers, mail-order kings, railcar barons, gum makers, and salt merchants who turned a swamp town into the capital of the American century. Dramatic rises, dynastic feuds, ballroom rivalries, and the kind of tasty social gossip that only old money produces.

Essential reading for fans of Gilded Age and Robber Baron history, Chicago natives and transplants, students of American industrial dynasties, and anyone who has ever wondered who put their name on the building.