The Witch of Wall Street.

[GREEN (Hetty).], SPARKES (Boyden). & MOORE (Samuel Taylor).

The Witch of Wall Street.

First edition thus. 8vo. [8], 338 pp., illustrated with photographs. Original green pictorial cloth, top edge in black, fore and bottom edges untrimmed, dust jacket (faint partial offsetting to endpapers, neat early ownership inscription to front free endpaper, contents otherwise clean and unmarked; jacket heavily edge worn with various nicks and closed tears, spine panel slightly faded with chipping at head and tail, still a very good copy overall). New York, Garden City, Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc, 1935.

£275.00

A biography of Hetty Green (1834-1916), nicknamed the ‘Witch of Wall Street’, one of the great American eccentrics, originally published in 1930 under the title Hetty Green: A Woman Who Loved Money.

Famous in her time as ‘the richest woman in America’ during the Gilded Age, Hetty Green’s staggering fortune originated in considerable inheritance, bolstered by early investments on Civil War bonds and greenbacks, going on to develop a portfolio including real estate and railroads. Infamous for her frugality and miserliness, Green was said to never to turn on the boiler for heat or hot water, with further unfounded claims that she warmed her oatmeal using an office radiator. Following the death of her husband in 1902, she was seen to wear only one old black dress and undergarments that she changed only after they had been worn out. Infamy aside, Hetty’s philosophy of conservative buying backed by substantial cash reserves warrants her status as a hugely significant figure in the history of Wall Street, a significance underscored as a female figure in what remains a thoroughly male dominated sphere.

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255757

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The Witch of Wall Street.

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