Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt founded a dynasty that would rule the Gilded Age, and his rise was dizzying. He possessed a genius and a mania for making money, but his obsession with material wealth would border on the pathological, and the pathology born of that wealth would go on to infect each successive generation in different ways. A family story about wealth and triumph becomes, in some respects, a story about sadness and isolation. But it’s also a story of unexpected poignancy and truth that shifts our understanding and expectations about this name “Vanderbilt” that we imagine we
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