Summary of Anderson Cooper & Katherine Howe’s Vanderbilt

The story of the Vanderbilt family embodies the ultimate American dream. Beginning with a farmer who came to America as an indentured servant, they rose to become one of the most influential and wealthiest families of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe’s Vanderbilt (2021) uncovers the lives of Cooper’s ancestors, individuals with personalities, weaknesses, and scandals. Cooper and Howe reveal how the family’s empire was built, how the family members lived lavishly in the Gilded Age, and how it all came crumbling down, one Vanderbilt at a time.