In this brilliantly written biography, Wall ranges from Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemour's spectacular rise in pre-Revolutionary France, to the family's migration to America and the founding of the Du Pont Company, to Alfred's death in 1935, charting the growth of one of America's great industrial dynasties. Illustrated.

Award-winning journalist Gerard Colby takes readers behind the scenes of one of America’s most powerful and enduring corporations; now with a new introduction by the author Their name is everywhere. America’s wealthiest industrial family by far and a vast financial power, the Du Ponts, from their mansions in northern Delaware’s “Chateau Country,” have long been leaders in the relentless drive to turn the United States into a plutocracy. The Du Pont story in this country began in 1800. Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, official keeper of the gunpowder of corrupt King Louis XVI, fled from revolutionary France to America. Two years later he founded the gunpowder company that called itself “America’s armorer”—and that President Wilson’s secretary of war called a “species of outlaws” for war profiteering. Du Pont Dynasty introduces many colorful characters, including “General” Henry du Pont, who profited from the Civil War to build the Gunpowder Trust, one of the first corporate monopolies; Alfred I. du Pont, betrayed by his cousins and pushed out of the organization, landing in social exile as the powerful “Count of Florida”; the three brothers who expanded Du Pont’s control to General Motors, fought autoworkers’ right to unionize, and then launched a family tradition of waging campaigns to destroy FDR’s New Deal regulatory reforms; Governor Pete du Pont, who ran for president and backed Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican Revolution; and Irving S. Shapiro, the architect of Du Pont’s ongoing campaign to undermine effective environmental regulation. From plans to force President Roosevelt from office, to munitions sales to warlords and the rising Nazis, to Freon’s damage to the planet’s life-protecting ozone layer, to the manufacture of deadly gases and the covered-up poisoning of Du Pont workers, to the reputation the company earned for being the worst polluter of America’s air and water, the Du Pont reign has been dappled with scandal for centuries. Culled from years of painstaking research and interviews, this fully documented book unfolds like a novel. Laying bare the bitter feuds, power plays, smokescreens, and careless unaccountability that erupted in murder, Colby pulls back the curtain on a dynasty whose formidable influence continues to this day. Suppressed in myriad ways and the subject of the author’s landmark federal lawsuit, Du Pont Dynasty is an essential history of the United States.

One of America s greatest houses, the unequaled home of Gilded Age philanthropist Alfred I. duPont, has been newly restored to national acclaim. Nemours Mansion and Gardens is the 222-acre estate and onetime home of Alfred I. duPont-photographer, manufacturer, musician, politician, banker, inventor, suffragist, newspaper owner, businessman, and philanthropist. Designed and built in the Louis XIV style in 1909 by Carrere and Hastings, it is one of the largest and most opulent houses in America, to be compared only with the likes of the Biltmore Estate, the White House, The Breakers, and Hearst Castle. With seventy rooms spread out over 46,000 square feet, it is capacious, yet an intimacy of detail and graciousness of proportion give the visitor a feeling of serenity and a special sense of place that is unique to Nemours. Newly and painstakingly renovated, the house-now a museum that can be toured-glows with the finish of its original splendor, captured at long last in a volume that sumptuously reflects the magnificence of a masterpiece. "

The story of Henry du Pont and the museum of Americana he envisioned.

The role of large-scale business enterprise—big business and its managers—during the formative years of modern capitalism (from the 1850s until the 1920s) is delineated in this pathmarking book. Alfred Chandler, Jr., the distinguished business historian, sets forth the reasons for the dominance of big business in American transportation, communications, and the central sectors of production and distribution.

Scale and Scope is Alfred Chandler's first major work since his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Visible Hand. Representing ten years of research into the history of the managerial business system, this book concentrates on patterns of growth and competitiveness in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, tracing the evolution of large firms into multinational giants and orienting the late twentieth century's most important developments. This edition includes the entire hardcover edition with the exception of the Appendix Tables.