A well-researched, informative book in which Robert Sobel, the noted financial historian, explores the lives and careers of nine representative innovators in business during the last 200 years, men frequently overlooked by contemporary social and political historians: Francis Cabot Lowell, John Wanamaker, Cyrus McCormick, James Hill, James Duke, Theodore Vail, Marcus Loew, Donald Douglas, and Royal Little. Each one was selected to illustrate a different aspect of American business tradition. All share the ability to grasp opportunity and to oppose conventional wisdom when necessary, both of which contributed to the fabric of modern corporate life. In the aggregate they created new organizational traditions that were imitated throughout the Western world. Book jacket.