Pugilistic Tycoon: Vanderbilt Jabs His Way To The Top Shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt has been described as combative. Author T.J. Stiles found court records that showed ...

When a man named Cornelius Vanderbilt started his career as a lowly boatman in the early 19th century, the word “tycoon” didn’t exist. And for good reason: neither did great industry ...

Wealthy families in the Gilded Age spent conspicuously, from fancy clothes to European palace-inspired mansions to lavish balls.

T.J. Stiles deploys all these icy adjectives to describe Cornelius Vanderbilt, the leather-faced subject of his monumental biography, “The First Tycoon.” It’s an odd way for a historian to ...

T.J. Stiles talked about his book [The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt] (Knopf, 2009) with Eric Arnesen. He also responded to questions from members of the audience. This was a ...

A Vanderbilt Trades In Her Pop Star Strut for a Runway Glide. Trying to reinvent herself as a model, Consuelo Vanderbilt Costin, a descendant of the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, spent ...

The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt T.J. Stiles Knopf, 736 pp., $37.50 REVIEWED BY JOAN BARBATO Jan Aertsen Van Der Bilt arrived in America in 1650. His solid Dutch surname was ...

T.J. Stiles talked about his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, [The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt] (Knopf, 2009). He was interviewed by Paul Hutton, author of [Phil Sheridan and ...

Cornelius Vanderbilt, the original "robber baron," was a self-made steamboat magnate who mastered the dynamics of the emerging railroad industry, challenged the financier Jay Gould in the New York ...