Christopher Knowlton

Christopher Knowlton, author of Cattle Kingdom and former Fortune writer, takes an in-depth look at the spectacular Florida land boom of the 1920s and shows how it led directly to the Great Depression.The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse. The decade there produced the largest human migration in American history, far exceeding the settlement of the West, as millions flocked to the grand hotels and the new cities that rose rapidly from the teeming wetlands. The boom spawned a new subdivision civilization—and the most egregious large-scale assault on the environment in the name of “progress.” Nowhere was the glitz and froth of the Roaring Twenties more excessive than in Florida. Here was Vegas before there was a gambling was condoned and so was drinking, since prohibition was not enforced. Tycoons, crooks, and celebrities arrived en masse to promote or exploit this new and dazzling American frontier in the sunshine. Yet, the import and deep impact of these historical events have never been explored thoroughly until now.In Bubble in the Sun Christopher Knowlton examines the grand artistic and entrepreneurial visions behind Coral Gables, Boca Raton, Miami Beach, and other storied sites, as well as the darker side of the frenzy. For while giant fortunes were being made and lost and the nightlife raged more raucously than anywhere else, the pure beauty of the Everglades suffered wanton ruination and the workers, mostly black, who built and maintained the boom, endured grievous abuses.Knowlton breathes dynamic life into the forces that made and wrecked Florida during the the real estate moguls Carl Fisher, George Merrick, and Addison Mizner, and the once-in-a-century hurricane whose aftermath triggered the stock market crash. This essential account is a revelatory—and riveting—history of an era that still affects our country today.

A revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made The open range cattle era lasted barely a quarter-century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades.Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We venture from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakota Badlands to the Chicago stockyards. We meet a diverse array of players—from the expert cowboy Teddy Blue to the failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. Knowlton shows us how they and others like them could achieve so many outsized feats: killing millions of bison in a decade, building the first opera house on the open range, driving cattle by the thousand, and much more. Cattle Kingdom is a revelatory new view of the Old West.

The name on the resume reads Caleb Sparrow: recent college graduate, son of a corporate titan, and amateur bird watcher. What he doesn’t tell the interviewer at New York’s premier management consulting firm, where he is applying for the position of research analyst, is that, until now, his only real goal has been to spot an ivory-billed woodpecker in the Big Thicket of East Texas—a dream he’s put aside for a career in business because “business look romantic.” Instead, Caleb tells the interviewer that his ambition is to join H&L because the broad management experience a job in consulting provides is the best initiation into the corporate world. And so Caleb is hired—but what he learns about the real world of business is that it is no aviary of ivory-billed birds, but a jungle presided over by capricious birds of prey.In this savagely funny and deliciously entertaining novel we join Caleb as he traverses an elating yet bewildering minefield of rites of passage, both in the office and in the gentrified social enclaves of Manhattan's Upper East Side. We watch Caleb struggle with deadlines, malfunctioning calculators, a callow banker roommate, and the whims of his employers; and his adventures take us from soft-carpeted board rooms to a seminar in executive survival techniques. Then a fateful office romance with a blond, brainy Harvard MBA and a disastrous presentation to a cabal of arrogant clients—an episode of corporate power-brokering as hilarious and chilling as any in recent fiction—precipitate a crisis. Suddenly Caleb's romantic certainties are thrown into confusion, and he must decide whether or not to "step irrevocably aboard."The Real World is The Graduate updated and Caleb Sparrow is a gray-flannel-suited Holden Caulfield gone Wall Street. It is, as well, a marvelously original and penetrating novel in its own right. In the course of Caleb's discovery that the society of business professionals is less than just and that the pursuit of the American Dream entails some unavoidable, sobering compromisies, we mark the debut of Christopher Knowlton, a writer of wit and style whose knowing, sympathetic, and long-overdue portrait of today's young business professional just may become a classic.