Wholesale Moneychangers by Upton Sinclair

[Globe Pequot Publishing] In this fictional account of the events and the key players involved in the Wall Street panic of 1907, the famous author of The Jungle depicts the glittering society of New York's fabulously wealthy, for whom money is not the object of existence, just the means of wielding power. In the midst of the alluring lifestyle of the high rollers, with their debutante balls, sumptuous summer homes in Newport, and their retinue of servants, a newcomer from the South arrives. The strikingly beautiful Lucy Dupree seeks entrance into high society through her childhood friend, Allan Montague, who is now a successful lawyer working in the city. Despite Allan's attempts to protect her, the naive Lucy soon finds herself caught in a jealous rivalry between two of the wealthiest and most unscrupulous powerbrokers. Their fight to destroy each other using high-stake financial manipulations precipitates a major Wall Street collapse and puts Lucy into great peril.Sinclair has created an exciting page-turner full of vivid characters showing rapacious capitalists at their very worst. This novel, exposing abuses that no newspaper dared to print, provides fascinating parallels to our own time of wild investor speculation and politics corrupted by money.