Hetty : the genius and madness of America's first female tycoon / Charles Slack.

Includes bibliography and index.

New Bedford.--Aunt Sylvia.--A test of wills.--Alone in a crowd.--Self-imposed exile.--Pride and pain.--Hetty storms Wall Street.--The view from Brooklyn.--Grooming a protégé.--Thou shalt not pass.--A lady of your age.--Across the river.--If my daughter is happy.--The hat was "Hetty" Green.--I'll outlive all of them!.--High times at Round Hill.--Scattered to the wind.

When J.P. Morgan called a meeting of New York's financial leaders after the stock market crash of 1907, Hetty Green was the only woman in the room. The Guinness Book of World Records memorialized her as the World's Greatest Miser, and, indeed, this unlikely robber baron -- who parlayed a comfortable inheritance into a fortune that was worth about 1.6 billion in today's dollars -- was frugal to a fault. But in an age when women weren't even allowed to vote, never mind concern themselves with interest rates, she lived by her own rules. In Hetty, Charles Slack reexamines her life and legacy, giving us, at long last, a splendidly "nuanced portrait" (Newsweek) of one of the greatest -- and most eccentric -- financiers in American history.