Corsair: The life of J. Pierpont Morgan

by Andrew Sinclair

The heavy old man with the huge ruby nose sat in the committee room. He was seventy-five years old, and he had been called to testify about what he had done in his life. He was believed to be the head of a Money Trust, which could create and avert panics on Wall Street. He was said to have saved the gold standard of the United States. He was known to be the most powerful financier in America and perhaps in the world. His name was J. Pierpont Morgan.

John Pierpont Morgan gave his name to an investment bank which still bears his name a hundred years after his death. In this biography, Andrew Sinclair chronicles his life and times.

Born in 1837, Morgan’s story is a cautionary tale of dedicating your days to earning money.

America was going through a period of massive expansion in the nineteenth century.

The idea of ‘manifest destiny’ was driving thousands of families west, while in the East New York welcomed immigrants and hucksters.

J.P. Morgan was a scion who drove American economic expansion.

Andrew SinclairMy Friend Judas. He was nominated as a member of the Apostles, but was not accepted, supposedly because he would not keep the society’s oath of secrecy. Sinclair returned to Cambridge to take his doctorate and became a Founding Fellow of Churchill College, where he was director of Historical Studies. He went on to direct the film version of the Dylan Thomas story Under Milk Wood, and won the Somerset Maugham Prize for his book The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman. Sinclair has also written biographies of Jack London, Bob Dylan, John Ford and Francis Bacon, among others, and has authored several works of fiction.

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Genres: Biography

269 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1981

About the author

Andrew Sinclair was born in Oxford in 1935 and was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. After earning a Ph.D. in American History from Cambridge, he pursued an academic career in the United States and England. His first two novels, written while he was still at Cambridge, were both published in 1959: The Breaking of Bumbo (based on his own experience in the Coldstream Guards, and later adapted for a 1970 film written and directed by Sinclair) and My Friend Judas. Other early novels included The Project (1960), The Hallelujah Bum (1963), and The Raker (1964). The latter, also available from Valancourt, is a clever mix of Gothic fantasy and macabre comedy and was inspired by Sinclair’s relationship with Derek Lindsay, the pseudonymous author of the acclaimed novel The Rack (1958). Sinclair’s best-known novel, Gog (1967), a highly imaginative, picaresque account of the adventures of a seven-foot-tall man who washes ashore on the Scottish coast, naked and suffering from amnesia, has been named one of the top 100 modern fantasy novels. As the first in the ‘Albion Triptych’, it was followed by Magog (1972) and King Ludd (1988).

Sinclair’s varied and prolific career has also included work in film and a large output of nonfiction. As a director, he is best known for Under Milk Wood (1972), adapted from a Dylan Thomas play and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Sinclair’s nonfiction includes works on American history (including The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman, which won the 1967 Somerset Maugham Award), books on Dylan Thomas, Jack London, Che Guevara, and Francis Bacon, and, more recently, works on the Knights Templar and the Freemasons.

Sinclair was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972. He lives in London.

Reviews

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really crappy! You can tell it was written by a friend. Totally biased and unrealistic!

[Clayton Brannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent not only as a biography but as a sterling history of the times he lived through.