BRC: What drew you to J. Pierpont Morgan as the subject for a biography?

JS: One of the first things that drew me to Morgan as the subject for a biography was how different he was from my previous subject, Alice James. I had been thinking and writing for five years about a female invalid in a family of intellectuals, and I very much wanted to change channels. A friend one night at dinner suggested "robber barons," and I thought that sounded great. In the books I read at first, Morgan seemed the most interesting of the men who dominated the American economy during the Gilded Age, although he'd been written about so much I thought I would have to find someone more obscure. But when I told my editor, Jason Epstein, what I was thinking about, he said "Morgan Morgan Morgan --- that's the interesting story of late 19th century America." And in reading through most of the books about Morgan (there were about a dozen), I found that he had been drawn mainly in caricature --- either as a great hero of industrial progress, or as a rapacious plunderer. If there was new documentary material through which it might be possible to see a more realistic, human figure, the story seemed to be worth telling again --- and then I learned that vaults of documents previously closed to scholars were now available at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. The idea of all that new information about a figure who had assumed mythological proportions in the American imagination seemed irresistible.

BRC: It has been almost 19 years since the original publication of your work ALICE JAMES: A BIOGRAPHY. You spent almost half of that time engaged in research for MORGAN. How long did it take to write the book, or were you writing during the researching process?

JS: I spent about five years reading through the material at the Morgan Library, and through other archives on both sides of the Atlantic as well. Finally I began to write, even though I knew I wasn't finished with the research, because research can go on forever, and I don't begin to formulate my ideas or figure out what I still need to know until I'm trying to tell the story. So for another ten years (it's hard to imagine it took so long --- I had expected the whole project to take six years, but once I was six years into it and not nearly finished, I couldn't exactly stop) I continued to write, and to do additional research as it seemed necessary.

BRC: What is extremely impressive about MORGAN is that, instead of relying upon earlier --- and often inaccurate --- treatises concerning Morgan and his times, you used documentation contemporaneous with his life, including, but not limited to, correspondence, newspaper accounts, and the like. How were you able to gain access to this material?

JS: There has been so much inaccuracy and mythology incorporated into the various histories and biographies about Morgan that I decided pretty early on not to take anybody else's word for what happened, whenever I could find primary sources. That explains a lot of what took fifteen years. As I said, just reading through the material at the Morgan Library took five, and I also tried to unearth papers left by his relatives, friends, colleagues, and political opponents, and found a few people in their nineties, who had known him, to interview. The search took me to England several times, to Italy, and to France --- which was a lot of fun --- as well as to libraries and private houses all over the US.

BRC: Your previous work ALICE JAMES: A BIOGRAPHY, which was awarded he Bancroft Prize, is being reissued this month. James and J. Pierpont Morgan were contemporaries. Is there something in particular that draws you to the nineteenth century as an inspiration for your work?

JS: I loved working in the late 19th century on the James family, and thought that having some knowledge of the period would help me learn about Morgan. It helped only a little, because the Jameses and the Morgans inhabited different universes. Henry James and Pierpont Morgan did cross paths --- James knew and often visited Morgan's father in England, and he wrote a thinly disguised portrait of Morgan in an obscure, late novel, THE OUTCRY --- and the two families knew several people in common. But the world of Boston intellectuals is so entirely different from that of New York bankers that I might as well have started on a new planet.

BRC: Did you encounter any major surprises while researching MORGAN?

JS: I encountered so many surprises I don't know where to start. The main one was that I went into the research looking, essentially, for the "robber baron" of popular Morgan mythology, and eventually found someone very different.

BRC: Were there any documents concerning Pierpont Morgan that you wished you could have accessed, but were unable to?

JS: Pierpont Morgan in New York wrote long letters to his father, Junius, in London twice a week every week from 1857 (when Pierpont moved to New York) until 1890, when Junius died. Junius, saved all those letters in chronological order, in bound volumes, but after he died, Pierpont burned them. I kept hoping that that wasn't true --- that I'd come across them on some shelf nobody had looked at before; I did find letterpress copies of a couple of volumes, and they were invaluable records of the professional activities and personal lives of the two men, but the rest never turned up.

BRC: Some of your commentary in MORGAN demonstrates that you have an excellent grasp of economic and financial concepts, especially with respect to the fundamentals of capitalism, as well as an uncanny ability to explain some of the more technical aspects of those matters in lay terms. Do you have an academic background in economics or is this something you acquired as part of your preparation for MORGAN?

JS: I'm delighted that you think my grasp of economic and financial concepts is strong, and that I've explained technical aspects of the story in clear terms. I didn't know anything about financial markets when I started out, and learning about them was much harder than I expected. I floundered for years, trying to get my bearings by reading as much as possible, talking to experts, and sitting in occasionally on business school courses. What finally helped me the most was a friend named Roger Alcaly, who is an economist with many years of experience in financial markets. One summer as we talked (I was working on Morgan's organization of US Steel), he got interested in the story, and began to send me things to read, to read what I was writing, and to talk it all over with me in exhaustive detail. Over the next few years he taught me how to think about individual deals, finance, and economics, and I could not have made sense of the financial aspects of the story without his great intellectual generosity.

BRC: MORGAN contains so much information about the life and times of his subject that it must have been overwhelming to attempt to keep all of the material organized. Can you explain what sort of classification system you use for your research?

JS: Organization is an extremely interesting problem in an enormous research project. I knew I couldn't tell at the outset what kind of system I would need, so I simply gathered material for a year or two without trying to impose much order on it. Once I saw more or less what the map was going to look like, I began to file things chronologically and also under subject headings. I have a big lateral file drawer for letters and diaries --- there are two separate sets of chronological files, one for Morgan, a file per year from his birth to his death, and one for everybody else (also a file per year). In addition, I have other file drawers and loose-leaf notebooks organized by topic --- there are sixteen notebooks, plus one called "Chronology," which just lists what happened every year. There are six binders for Morgan's business affairs, five for his art collecting, and five for his life. Each of those has dividers with subheadings (family, schooling, houses, illnesses, friends, travels, etc.), like a high school notebook. Since I started this book in 1983, I wasn't yet completely comfortable with the computer, and so I used this old-fashioned method, which was very cumbersome but had some important advantages. I could file Xeroxes of documents --- letters, diaries, things written by hand, by Morgan or others. There is something extremely important about reading original documents again and again --- getting to know the person's handwriting, seeing the mistakes, the crossed out passages, the misdating of letters. You learn a lot by this kind of direct access to the person who wrote the document a hundred years ago --- and if it had all been typed into my laptop, I'd have my version of what was said, not his. Still, if I were doing it all over again now, I'm sure I would take most of my notes on a computer, and I did begin to do that as I went through this project. For those sections, however, I've had to go back and check against the original documents several times, because it's so easy to make mistakes when you're transcribing. Also, after several years I had so much material that I wasn't able to find it readily, and decided I needed an index. It took about six months to create. I read through every letter and diary entry in the chronological files, and entered them into subject files (on my computer), so that if there were fourteen letters referring to Morgan's first wife in 1860, and if three of those referred to her interest in art, I could look up those subjects in the index and find them quickly. It helped a lot --- and having to reread the documents in order to create the index helped me assimilate that overwhelming mass of material. The evidence has to inhabit you, in a way, and you have to inhabit it, in order for a vital story to take shape in your imagination. You can't make a character come alive, and it doesn't always happen, but there are certain moments in this strange, long process in which something mysterious and intangible does suddenly come to seem vivid and real. Richard Holmes has written wonderfully about this experience in his book, Footsteps. He calls writing biography "an act of deliberate psychological trespass, an invasion or encroachment of the present upon the past, and in some sense the past upon the present." There has to be "a continuous living dialogue between [biographer and subject] as they move over the same historical ground, the same trail of events. There is between them a ceaseless discussion, a reviewing and questioning of motives and actions and consequences, a steady if subliminal exchange of attitudes, judgments and conclusions. It is fictional, imaginary, because of course the subject cannot really, literally, talk back; but the biographer must come to act and think of his subject as if he can."

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