John D.

"No Help Wanted" signs decorated the doors of Cleveland storekeepers and merchants in early September, 1855, when sixteen-year-old John Rockefeller set out to seek employment for his budding talents. It was a hard year in the West. For days and weeks the youth tramped the streets, grave, self-centered, tenacious in his quest. -from "A Pious Youth Gets a Flying Start" What was the world's first billionaire really like? This highly entertaining work, by an acclaimed business biographer, seeks to explode the "shadowy myth" of John D. Rockefeller and reveal the "rare and astonishing personality" behind it. From his humble roots in Ohio, where he learned thrift and industry as the bookkeeper of a dockside warehouse, to the death threats this "modern Machiavelli" received during the early years of Standard Oil, to his ascendancy to the rank of "the most detested man in the country"-when churches refused his donations as tainted money-and his subsequent formation of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, this is a knowingly ironic and subtly witty work of biography. JOHN K. WINKLER is also the author of W.R. Hearst: An American Phenomenon (1928) and Morgan the Magnificent, or The Life of J. Pierpont Morgan (1930).