For more than two hundred years, fortunes have been made -- and lost -- on Wall Street by men and women playing the great game of capitalism. Many have repeated the mistakes of their forebears, and some have enjoyed similar triumphs. In this gripping and informative book, John Steele Gordon tells history lovers, armchair investors, financiers, and day traders alike everything they need to know about Wall Street's wild ride to power.

Wall Street began as the northern line of defense for a wilderness trading post, at a time when money was limited to gold, silver, and Indian wampum. Today, Wall Street is a metaphor for the global financial market, and money exists mostly on computer screens. More than three million Americans are now employed by the securities industry, and Wall Street wields the sort of power once reserved to nation states. How did an unimpressive little byway become so formidable? In this richly textured narrative history, John Steele Gordon brings to life the remarkable cast of bankers and brokers, visionaries and crooks who made it happen.

Nature gave New York one of the world's great harbors, and the Dutch founders gave the city its enduring love of making money. In pursuit of that love, New Yorkers began meeting under the trees and lampposts of Wall Street to buy and sell securities. As the country expanded westward, canal and railroad companies came to Wall Street looking for capital. Later still, manufacturers came as well, and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had the mightiest national economy in the world. No small part of that development was due to Wall Street, which, time and again, has demonstrated how Adam Smith's invisible hand turns the pursuit of economic self-interest into common wealth.

Gordon tells the fascinating stories of the key players of the Great Game, including Jacob Little, the first great Wall Street plunger; Commodore Vanderbilt, the Street's greatest tactician; Hetty Green, the "richest woman in the world," who was terrified of being poor; J. P. Morgan, the country's most important banker, who twice saved it from economic disaster when the government couldn't; Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, who was a thief; and Charles E. Merrill, who brought Wall Street to Main Street and transformed both in the process. From Alexander Hamilton to Michael Milken, the history of Wall Street is a history of risk, courage, avarice, patriotism, power, genius, and even, occasionally, remarkable stupidity.

Wall Street has finally found a biographer worthy of her extraordinary story in acclaimed business historian John Steele Gordon. As more and more Americans invest their money in the stock market, The Great Game is a lively and absorbing account of how Wall Street became a crucial part of all our lives.

John Steele Gordon was born in New York City in 1944 into a family long associated with the city and its financial community. Both his grandfathers held seats on the New York Stock Exchange. He was educated at Millbrook School and Vanderbilt University, graduating with a B.A. in history in 1966.

After college he worked as a production editor for Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) for six years before leaving to travel, driving a Land-Rover from New York to Tierra del Fuego, a nine-month journey of 39,000 miles.

After returning to New York he served on the staffs of Congressmen Herman Badillo and Robert Garcia. He has been a full-time writer for the last twenty years. His second book, The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street, a history of Wall Street in the 1860's, was published in 1988. His third book, Hamilton's Blessing: the Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt, was published in 1997. The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000, was published by Scribner, a Simon and Schuster imprint, in November, 1999. A two-hour special based on The Great Game aired on CNBC on April 24th, 2000. His latest book, a collection of his columns from American Heritage magazine, entitled The Business of America, was published in July, 2001, by Walker. His history of the laying of the Atlantic Cable, A Thread Across the Ocean, was published in June, 2002. His next book, to be published by HarperCollins, is a history of the American economy.

He specializes in business and financial history. He has had articles published in, among others, Forbes, Forbes ASAP, Worth, the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed pages, the Washington Post's Book World and Outlook. He is a contributing editor at American Heritage, where he has written the "Business of America" column since 1989.

In 1991 he traveled to Europe, Africa, North and South America, and Japan with the photographer Bruce Davidson for Schlumberger, Ltd., to create a photo essay called "Schlumberger People," for the company's annual report.

In 1992 he was the co-writer, with Timothy C. Forbes and Steve Forbes, of Happily Ever After?, a video produced by Forbes in honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the magazine.

He is a frequent commentator on Marketplace, the daily Public Radio business-news program heard on more than two hundred stations throughout the country. He has appeared on numerous other radio and television shows, including New York: A Documentary Film by Ric Burns, Business Center and Squawk Box on CNBC, and The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He was a guest in 2001 on a live, two-hour edition of Booknotes with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN.