Fraser brilliantly traces the imaginative history of Wall Street through novels and plays and political polemics, in the great prose of Twain and Wharton, Melville and James and a host of other writers, but also remembers the screams of rage of forgotten and marginalized protestors against the colossus that grew big speculating with other people's money. He weaves together the history of cut-throat business deals with the delirious image of the place in popular culture. The book is also a wonderful history of US economic life: from the exploitation of the shifting frontier, to the railway boom, the surreal corruption of the Gilded Age, and the time of the robber barons and of Morgan and gigantic trusts. Fraser takes the story through the great crash, the New Deal, the Second World War and the long golden age that followed it, and finally offers a measured indictment of an irresponsibly unfettered free market and of its destabilizing effects - at a time when investment on Wall Street has become a popular mania in the USA.