Ron Chernow's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the Morgan banking dynasty is one of the great works of American financial history, tracing four generations of Morgan bankers from the Victorian era through the late twentieth century. Beginning with the founding patriarch Junius Spencer Morgan in London and continuing through his son J.P. Morgan Sr. — whose influence over American finance at the turn of the century was so vast that he effectively served as the nation's central bank before the Federal Reserve existed — and on through the twentieth-century evolution of J.P. Morgan & Co. and Morgan Stanley, Chernow charts the rise and transformation of American capitalism with extraordinary depth and narrative power. The book documents Morgan's role in financing the great industrial combinations of the Gilded Age, averting the Panic of 1907, underwriting World War I, surviving the 1929 crash, adapting to New Deal regulation that split commercial and investment banking, and navigating the complex financial landscape of the postwar decades. Along the way, Chernow illuminates the values, relationships, and cultural assumptions of Wall Street's Protestant establishment with a critical eye that never becomes polemical. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the American financial system was built.