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Silver Kings

Author Oscar Lewis
Ebook
Knopf
On sale Dec 05, 2012 | 286 Pages | 9780307828040
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Thousands of readers remember with pleasure Oscar Lewis’s fine book on the Western railroad robber barons, The Big Four. Silver Kings is a companion piece, dealing as it does with the big four of the Nevada Comstock Lode, one of the greatest of all silver mines. These were really fabulous men who led strangely fascinating lives. John W. Mackay (the father of Clarence Mackay), best known of the four, built up the Postal Telegraph and Commercial Cable systems. His wife, Marie Hungerford, for years after her marriage saw little of America, but kept the society of Paris and London agog. James G. Fair was a master mechanic and one of the shrewdest of financiers—of all the Comstock’s conspicuous figures easily the least admired, a fact of which he was aware and which he regarded with complete indifference. He became a United State Senator and his elder daughter, Tessie, married Herman Oelrichs, then a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor and member of the prominent New York and Newport family. James Clair Flood’s great mansion atop Nob Hill in San Francisco is now the Pacific Union Club. William S. O’Brien, Flood’s partner, was the most shadowy of the quartet.

It’s a rich field that Mr. Lewis has mined, and his story, which never lags, is set against the stunning background of the Virginia City of the seventies as well as the San Francisco of that era. The result is a really magnificent piece of authentic Americana.
Oscar Lewis was born in New York City in 1914, and grew up on a small farm in upstate New York. He received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1940, and taught at Brooklyn College and Washington University before helping to found the anthropology department at the University of Illinois, where he was a professor from 1948 until his death. From his first visit to Mexico in 1943, Mexican peasants and city dwellers were among his major interests. In addition to The Children of Sanchez, his other studies of Mexican life include Life in a Mexican Village, Five Families, Pedro Martinez, and A Death in the Sanchez Family. He is also the author of La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York, which won the National Book Award, and Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba, with his wife, Ruth Maslow Lewis, and Susan M. Rigdon. Lewis also published widely in both academic journals and popular periodicals such as Harper's Magazine. Some of his best-known articles were collected in Anthropological Essays (1970). The recipient of many distinguished grants and fellowships, including two Guggenheims, Lewis was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died in 1970. View titles by Oscar Lewis

About

Thousands of readers remember with pleasure Oscar Lewis’s fine book on the Western railroad robber barons, The Big Four. Silver Kings is a companion piece, dealing as it does with the big four of the Nevada Comstock Lode, one of the greatest of all silver mines. These were really fabulous men who led strangely fascinating lives. John W. Mackay (the father of Clarence Mackay), best known of the four, built up the Postal Telegraph and Commercial Cable systems. His wife, Marie Hungerford, for years after her marriage saw little of America, but kept the society of Paris and London agog. James G. Fair was a master mechanic and one of the shrewdest of financiers—of all the Comstock’s conspicuous figures easily the least admired, a fact of which he was aware and which he regarded with complete indifference. He became a United State Senator and his elder daughter, Tessie, married Herman Oelrichs, then a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor and member of the prominent New York and Newport family. James Clair Flood’s great mansion atop Nob Hill in San Francisco is now the Pacific Union Club. William S. O’Brien, Flood’s partner, was the most shadowy of the quartet.

It’s a rich field that Mr. Lewis has mined, and his story, which never lags, is set against the stunning background of the Virginia City of the seventies as well as the San Francisco of that era. The result is a really magnificent piece of authentic Americana.

Author

Oscar Lewis was born in New York City in 1914, and grew up on a small farm in upstate New York. He received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1940, and taught at Brooklyn College and Washington University before helping to found the anthropology department at the University of Illinois, where he was a professor from 1948 until his death. From his first visit to Mexico in 1943, Mexican peasants and city dwellers were among his major interests. In addition to The Children of Sanchez, his other studies of Mexican life include Life in a Mexican Village, Five Families, Pedro Martinez, and A Death in the Sanchez Family. He is also the author of La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York, which won the National Book Award, and Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba, with his wife, Ruth Maslow Lewis, and Susan M. Rigdon. Lewis also published widely in both academic journals and popular periodicals such as Harper's Magazine. Some of his best-known articles were collected in Anthropological Essays (1970). The recipient of many distinguished grants and fellowships, including two Guggenheims, Lewis was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died in 1970. View titles by Oscar Lewis

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