Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon

“This book is more than the story of an eccentric, driven woman; it is a window on the country between the Civil War and World War I when great fortunes were made—even by a woman.”—USA Today

A biography of Hetty Green, known as the “Witch of Wall Street,” who dueled with the giants of the Gilded Age and amassed a fortune of $100 million before women had the right to vote

A full century before Martha Stewart, Oprah, and Madonna became icons of female entrepreneurship, there was Hetty Green, America’s richest woman, who stood alone among the roguish giants of the Gilded Age as the first lady of capitalism. While derided as “a witch of Wall Street” in her lifetime, today, Hetty ranks near the top of America’s list of greatest financiers.

She was a female Citizen Kane and America’s richest woman. She bought and sold real estate and railroads, fought hard and sometimes dirty, cornered markets, and amassed cash reserves to rival the great banks. She was the lone woman among a gallery of Gilded Age rogue heroes-Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the Vanderbilts.

This new biography looks well beyond the lore and historical prejudices to present a brilliant, ruthless entrepreneur vastly ahead of her time, a financial empire ruler known simply as Hetty.

A full century before Martha Stewart, Oprah, and Madonna became icons, generations before women swept through Wall Street, and decades before they even had the right to vote, there was Hetty Green, America's richest woman, who stood alone among the roguish giants of the Gilded Age as the first lady of capitalism and is remembered as the Witch of Wall Street.

At the time of her death in 1916, Hetty Green's personal fortune was estimated at $100 million ($1.6 billion today), and the financial empire she built on real estate and railroads rivaled that of Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and some of the nation's biggest banks. Today, Hetty Green ranks near the top of America's list of greatest financiers, in company with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and billionaire-investor Warren Buffett. But in history books she has remained merely a footnote, a miser and an eccentric, whose character flaws and personal choices unjustly overshadowed her remarkable accomplishments on the fierce battlefield of American industry and commerce.

In Hetty, Charles Slack reexamines the life, work, and conflicted legacy of the exceptionally resourceful, ruthless, and inimitable woman who turned a comfortable inheritance into a fortune through instinct, courage, cunning, greed, and determination to succeed at a man's game on her own terms: from her childhood in the Quaker community of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where she learned about business by reading financial papers to her father, to the battle over her inheritance that was one of the most controversial legal cases of her time; from her collisions with railroad magnate Collis Huntington to her rescue of New York City from financial ruin.

Looking well beyond the lore and historical prejudices, Charles Slack presents a full portrait of a true American original, a female Citizen Kane who, having turned away from the conventions of her time, as a woman, a wife, a mother, and a mogul, led a life of a different sort, with occasionally tragic results, becoming both a hero and a victim of her era. Above all, it is a story of an uncompromising, larger-than-life, flawed woman who ruled a vast financial empire but was known, simply, as Hetty.