Title: Still the definitive bio?
Product review: I studied this book about 25 years ago when I was studying the Homestead Steel Strike, but I'm betting it's still the best all-around balanced and well written portrait of Carnegie. He's got to be about the most interesting of the great late 19th century US capitalists, the biggest rags to riches story of them all and a man whose mind tried to contain and maintain diametrically opposed ideas about rights of labor and rights of property. In the end, of course, he caved and went with the money, but hey, at least he never really felt good about it, and he did set the standard for philanthropy in the last 20 years of his life (after becoming the world's first billionaire in 1900). A very complex man, and Wall stays balanced about him. The biographies I've read of other steel barons in Carnegie's companies (eg, Frick, Charles Schwab) are mostly disappointing.
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