Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

As a biographer, Chernow brings considerable expertise to the examination of Rockefeller’s business affairs. By the time he published Titan, Chernow had already won the National Book Award for The House of Morgan (1990), a study of Rockefeller’s contemporary and America’s leading financier, J. Pierpont Morgan. Later, Chernow wrote Alexander Hamilton (2004), a biography of a Founding Father and America’s first Treasury Secretary, which inspired the Broadway musical Hamilton.

Chernow himself plays no role in the narrative. The only place where Chernow inserts himself into the story is the moment at which he decided to write the biography. In the book’s foreword, he describes his visit to the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. In search of Rockefeller’s “inner voice” (xv), Chernow came across a candid interview of the titan conducted in private by William O. Inglis over a three-year period, from 1917 to 1920. This discovery convinced Chernow that Rockefeller’s life merited a fresh look.

John D. Rockefeller was a business mogul who dominated the oil industry in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, amassing the largest private fortune of any American at that time. He was also a generous benefactor who revolutionized philanthropy. Chernow examines at length both the relentlessly-acquisitive and the historically-charitable manifestations of Rockefeller’s complex personality.