John Kenneth Galbraith's classic account of the 1929 stock market crash, first published in 1954 and regularly updated, remains the most readable and analytically sharp history of the episode that triggered the Great Depression and reshaped global capitalism. Galbraith traces the speculative fever of the late 1920s from its roots in the postwar prosperity of the decade through the formation of investment trusts, the explosion of margin lending, and the psychological momentum that caused investors, analysts, and economists to convince themselves that a new economic era had permanently eliminated the business cycle. He documents the crash itself with dramatic precision, capturing the sequence of selling waves that turned a correction into a catastrophe, and analyzes how the fragility embedded in the leveraged financial system transformed a stock market decline into a decade-long economic depression. Galbraith's dry wit and mordant observations about the foolishness of experts and the complicity of regulators give the book a satirical edge that makes it as entertaining as it is instructive. His core thesis — that speculative manias follow a predictable pattern of self-reinforcing optimism, leverage accumulation, and eventual collapse — has proven remarkably applicable to every subsequent financial crisis, including 2000 and 2008.