Overview

"This biography was written by two-time Pulitzer winner Marquis James in 1948, but was never published. W.R. Grace's son commissioned James to write it when the author was at the height of his career. However, as Viking Press was about to print the book, the Grace company decided not to release it. It then lay in the firm's archives until it was uncovered by Lawrence Clayton of the University of Alabama. ""Merchant Adventurer"" tells the story of one of America's most successful immigrants. First arriving in America in 1846, Irish-born William R. Grace worked his way up from ordinary seaman to become master of a vast commercial empire, reformer of the Democratic party and New York City's first Catholic mayor. Grace's fortune quickly rose once he began supplying ships in the Peruvian guano trade. By the late 1860s, Grace was a rich man; his firm, headquartered in New York, operated vessels all over the world, helped build railroads in Latin America, and ran guns to Peru for its disastrous war against Chile. Yet Grace's energies did not stop with his business dealings. In the 1880s he served twice as mayor of New York, successfully fighting the corruption of Tammany Hall. As the century waned, he battled to control the rubber market and nearly won a contract to build what is now the Panama Canal."

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A long-lost literary treasure with an absorbing tale of its own. In the course of a distinguished career, James (d. 1955) - winner of two Pulitzers, for The Raven (1930) and Andrew Jackson (1938) - developed the lucrative sideline of producing corporate histories. Commissioned in 1944 to write the life story of William Russell Grace (founder of the multinational enterprise that still bears his name), James completed a manuscript that Viking was set to publish in 1948. For reasons still not entirely clear, the project was aborted and the galleys consigned to a warehouse. They were unearthed years later by Lawrence A. Clayton, a University of Alabama professor researching a scholarly history of W.R. Grace & Co. in Latin America. The finder arranged for the text's publication and here has contributed an informative introduction on the belated appearance of an altogether engrossing period piece. Drawing on unrestricted access to corporate archives and personal papers, James offers a detailed account of an immensely successful emigre. A son of Ireland's impoverished gentry, Grace (1832-1904) decided early on to make his way across the water. Having amassed a small fortune as a supplier to the sailing vessels that exported Peru's vast guano deposits, after the Civil War he moved his base of operations and family to Manhattan. There, Grace became even wealthier, building a mercantile empire whose far-flung interests ranged from railroads and rubber plantations through global shipping lines. He also found time for politics, bucking Tammany Hall to win election as the city's first Roman Catholic mayor. More merchant prince than robber baron, Grace earned considerable influence in the highest councils of the Democratic Party as an advocate of good government and reform. A lively chronicle, doubly welcome because it rescues from undeserved obscurity one of the Gilded Age's more consequential players - as well as a master annalist's handiwork. (Kirkus Reviews)

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