How Not to Get Rich, Alan Pell Crawford
How Not to Get Rich, Alan Pell Crawford
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How Not to Get Rich
The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain

Author: Alan Pell Crawford

Narrator: Peter Berkrot

Unabridged: 5 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/17/2017

Synopsis

Mark Twain's lifetime spans America's era of greatest economic growth. And Twain was an active, even giddy, participant in all the great booms and busts of his time, launching himself into one harebrained get-rich-quick scheme after another. But far from striking it rich, the man who coined the term "Gilded Age" failed with comical regularity to join the ranks of plutocrats who made this period in America notorious for its wealth and excess.

Instead, Twain's mining firm failed, despite striking real silver. He ended up somehow owing money over his 30,000 acres of inherited land. And his plan to market the mysteriously energizing coca leaves from the Amazon fizzled when no ships would sail to South America. Undaunted, Twain poured his money into the latest newfangled inventions of his time, all of which failed miserably.

In Crawford's hilarious telling, the familiar image of Twain takes on a new and surprising dimension. Twain's story of financial optimism and perseverance is a kind of cracked-mirror history of American business itself—in its grandest cockeyed manifestations, its most comical lows, and its determined refusal to ever give up.

About Alan Pell Crawford

Alan Pell Crawford is the author of Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman-and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century America and Thunder on the Right: The "New Right" and the Politics of Resentment. His writings have appeared in American History, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and he is a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. Crawford has had a residential fellowship at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. Alan lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Reviews

Goodreads review by SundayAtDusk on September 13, 2017

How Not To Get Rich reminded me how little I knew about Mark Twain’s life and writings. It has been decades since I have read anything by him or about him. Thus, when I saw the cover and title of the book I immediately thought obviously a man’s whose first love was writing should not have been so in......more

Goodreads review by Kirby on August 07, 2019

This book was disappointing. Firstly, the author decided to write about Twain's financial mishaps chronologically, without any real indication of when you were reading about something greatly important to his life and development or if this page of the book was just a summary of something that had p......more

Goodreads review by Jay on September 13, 2022

I had previously read the mega-sized three volume Mark Twain complete autobiography that was released in the last decade or so. I found that many of the subjects of Twain’s attempts to become rich, investing in inventions, mining for silver, giving speeches, etc. were well covered in those books, so......more

Goodreads review by David on August 17, 2018

good reminder that one can excel at something [writing] and be awful at something else [investing, money management] even if both seem to rely on intelligence/book smarts. I appreciated the anecdote that Twain "worked in a bookstore, but that didn't work out either because 'customers bothered me so m......more

Goodreads review by Heidi Ha on February 07, 2018

What a fun book! The quotes and correspondence by Mark Twain sprinkled throughout reminds me of just how funny this many truly was (and still is). I love his wry wit. A fascinating glimpse into how business and entrepreneurship work in the late 1800s. A bit of a sad and cautionary tale too. The book......more

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