The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

Stiles won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for this biography, which is the definitive life of Cornelius Vanderbilt and is built on extensive archival research.

The business material traces a career across three industries. Vanderbilt began in Staten Island ferries and coastal steamboats, where he competed by cutting fares below cost until incumbents paid him to leave a route, a tactic he repeated for decades. He then built the Nicaragua transit route during the California gold rush, moving passengers across Central America faster and cheaper than the Panama alternative. He entered railroads late, in his seventies, and assembled the New York Central system through the Harlem, Hudson River and Central lines.

The financial material is what makes the book important. Stiles shows Vanderbilt operating in a period when the corporation as an institution was still being invented, when the distinction between a company's money and its owner's was not established, and when stock market manipulation including the Erie corner and the Harlem corners were legitimate competitive tactics. He argues Vanderbilt's real innovation was recognising that a corporation could be a vehicle for accumulating and deploying capital at a scale no individual could manage, and that his contemporaries had not grasped this.

The book is long and Stiles is careful about evidence, distinguishing what the records establish from what the legends assert. It is the best available account of American business during the corporation's formative period.