Hetty

When J. P. Morgan called a meeting of New York’s financial leaders after the stock market crash of 1907, Hetty Green was the only woman in the room. The Guinness Book of World Records memorialized her as the World’s Greatest Miser, and, indeed, this unlikely robber baron — who parlayed a comfortable inheritance into a fortune that was worth about 1.6 billion in today’s dollars — was frugal to a fault. But in an age when women weren’t even allowed to vote, never mind concern themselves with interest rates, she lived by her own rules. Hetty reexamines her life and legacy, giving us, at long last, a splendidly “nuanced portrait” (Newsweek) of one of the greatest — and most eccentric — financiers in American history.

Join the Fairhaven Historical Society as we welcome author Charles Slack as he discusses his book "Hetty." This event is free, but donations are greatly appreciated.

Charles Slack is the award-winning author of several books. His latest, Liberty’s First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech, was published in March 2015 by Grove Atlantic. The paperback was released in March 2016. Hetty, based on the life of Wall Street pioneer Hetty Green, won the 2005 Connecticut State Book Award for Biography and the Elle Magazine Reader Prize for Biography. Noble Obsession was based on the life of inventor Charles Goodyear. The New York Public Library named Noble Obsession one of the 25 best “Books to Remember” for 2002. Blue Fairways, an American journey based on a trip down the East Coast from Maine to Florida, one public golf course at a time, was a finalist for the United States Golf Association’s International Book Award.

A graduate of Harvard, Slack was a newspaper reporter in Tennessee and Virginia before turning to writing and editing full-time. He works as a business and financial writer and editor and lives in Connecticut with his family.