About the Author

I had the good fortune and privilege of growing up in Vienna, Libya, London, Paris, Turkey, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia, thanks to my father's work as an economist with the U.S. Agency for International Development. We were always traveling and as I got older school trips involved riding elephants to a maharaja's palace or visiting Cambodian temples. By 1970, when I entered Barnard College in New York, I had spent all but three years of my life overseas. I was something of a stranger in my own land.

After graduation I became a journalist, serving a brief internship in Washington, D.C., before taking a job in upstate New York at the Troy Record. Covering the working-class towns of Watervliet and Green Island during the Bicentennial year, I wrote many an article about the region’s long-gone glory years when water power, factories, the Erie Canal, and the railroads generated real industrial wealth. It was my first taste of the pleasures of writing history.

In 1977, I earned an MS from the Columbia Journalism School and after a couple of years at The Bergen (N.J.) Record, became a free-lance writer based in Manhattan. A story written for The New York Times about the efforts to revive the Grand Concourse, the magnificent Champs-Elysées of the stricken Bronx, grew into my first book. How—in our rich nation—had this once-thriving borough come so close to annihilation from poverty, crime, abandonment, and arson?

In 1983, I moved with my husband to Baltimore, Maryland, and began working on my second book: why did the U.S. have such a powerful drug culture? In 1992, I received a Ph.D. in American history from Johns Hopkins University, having written my thesis on the history of illegal drugs. Hep-cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams was published in 1996. Susan Berresford and Bob Curvin at the Ford Foundation were important supporters of this early work, providing money and encouragement for both books. The National Endowment for the Humanities also awarded a fellowship for Hep-cats. While helping create a new museum for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, I began thinking about my next project.

After two long, complicated books about the underside of American life, I wanted to write about American success. I was drawn to the Gilded Age, those tumultuous decades after the Civil War when the United States emerged as a wealthy industrial power, an amazing engine of invention and prosperity. While reading an old biography of George Westinghouse, I came across his battle with Edison over domination of the neophyte technology of electricity. Known as the War of the Electric Currents, this famous AC versus DC episode had never been told in all its gothic and glorious detail. The machinations, triumphs, and disappointments were so satisfyingly dramatic. Yet, as I visited the places where Empires of Light unfolded--Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and Wilmerding, outside Pittsburgh—it was sad to see how little of their industrial glory and prosperity remained.

While finishing Empires of Light, I began researching another Gilded Age engineering epic--this about Alexander Cassatt and the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad coming into New York City. What most surprised me while working on Conquering Gotham was how much of New York life in the early 1900s took place on the water. Ninety million people crossed the Hudson River each year via the many ferry lines. Travelers to Albany or Boston or New England were likely to go by steamboat. On hot summer days and evenings, New Yorkers jammed huge pleasure boats plying the cooling waters of the city’s bays and rivers.

About the time I sent in my first draft of Conquering Gotham, I had the honor to serve as the 2006 National Book Award non-fiction chair. That spring, the books began to arrive in a trickle, by summer it was a torrent, until six hundred or so volumes were arrayed in my dining and living rooms in alphabetical piles. The five of us on the panel conferred regularly by e-mail and monthly telephone conferences, alerting one another to this or that exceptional title. The culmination was a glamorous black-tie dinner in a Manhattan ballroom. Apparently, our choice, Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time, was something of a surprise—even to the author, who bounded onstage with such joy when I announced he was the winner. His book became the best-seller it deserved to be. A month or two later while in a café, I overheard a woman, clutching his book, say to a friend, “You have got to read this.” A sweet moment.

The evening after the book awards, I boarded a plane to fly to Paris, where I spent the next month researching all things Eiffel, some days in the Eiffel Archives in the Musée d’Orsay overlooking the Seine, others in the modernistic French National Library. I discovered the French have completely different computer keyboards—very confusing. Of course, since I had the bonne chance to be in Paris, I ate memorable meals and developed an unseemly devotion to a particular macaroon cookie found only in certain French pastry shops.

One of the great pleasures of working on Eiffel’s Tower was spending so much time immersed in the lives of those who sought fame and fortune at the 1889 World’s Fair. I was especially fond of James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the expatriate publisher of The New York Herald and the Paris Herald. This brilliant editor had such bizarre behavior and whims—naked nocturnal carriage rides, owls (his lucky talisman) galore arrayed in his offices, mansions, and yachts, and a herd of small lapdogs whose opinions he valued highly. Great fun.