Mellon biography
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In , at the age of seventy-two and “in the evening of life,” Thomas Mellon published his autobiography in a limited edition exclusively for his family. He was a distinguished and highly successful Pittsburgh entrepreneur, judge, and banker, and his descendants would play major roles in American business, art, and philanthropy. Two of his sons, Andrew William and Richard Beatty, were to join Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller as the four wealthiest men in the United States. Thomas Mellon was an anomaly among the great American capitalists of his time. Highly literate and intelligent, astute and deadly honest about his own life and financial success, and an excellent narrative writer with a chilly but genuine sense of humor, he wrote a perspective and self-revealing book that remains to this day a major autobiography and an important source for American social and business history. That it has found very few readers in the year since its publication is due to the author himself. Warn
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Andrew Mellon was born on March 24, , in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Thomas Mellon and Sarah Jane Negley. Thomas Mellon spent most of his life as a judge, but had established himself as a banker. Young Andrew Mellon observed his father's financial dealings with his clients, many of whom were Republican politicians and notable industrialists. After completing his secondary schooling, Andrew Mellon attended the Western University of Pennsylvania (University of Pittsburgh) but left three months before graduation in to begin his own construction company. Mellon's father loaned him money with interest to establish the company. Andrew Mellon repaid his father and saw success in his first venture and later sold his company in , predicting a decline in the industry. Mellon returned to his family and began working at the family bank, T. Mellon & Sons, with his father.
Mellon proved to be a good banker, expanding the bank through strategic investments, and made his brother Richard Mello
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Mellon: An American Life
Mellon: An American Life is a biographical book detailing the life Andrew Mellon (–), American banker, businessman, and philanthropist. Written by Sir David Cannadine, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, the book describes how Mellon built his personal wealth by investing and running businesses in major industries, eventually becoming the sekreterare of the Treasury beneath Presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.[1] He was also noted for founding the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Cannadine acknowledges the controversy that surrounds Mellon and the other industrialists of his era. Like John D. Rockefeller Jr., Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, John Pierpont Morgan Sr., and William Randolph Hearst, the businessmen were part of a fundamental transformation of the American economy in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
A previous commissioned biography was written by Burton J. H