Big Four
Here for the first time is told in a single volume one of the most remarkable stories in American history. An Eastener is never long in California without hearing something of “the big four”: four Sacramento shopkeepers—Collis P. Huntington, Lelan Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker—who got control of the newly organized Central Pacific Railroad property. These men are portrayed in Mr. Lewis’s volume vividly and with a great wealth or pertinent anecdote. Thus their true characters are revealed and the grandiose era in which they lived and operated is re-created as well. Huntington, the shrewd manipulator and lobbyist in Washington, founded the great fortune which is responsible for the magnificent library at San Marino; Leland Stanford, Governor of California…
Oscar Lewis was born in New York City in 1914, and grew up on a small farm in upstate New York. He received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1940, and taught at Brooklyn College and Washington University before helping to found the anthropology department at the University of Illinois, where he was a professor from 1948 until his death. From his first visit to Mexico in 1943, Mexican peasants and city dwellers were among his major interests. In addition to The Children of Sanchez, his other studies of Mexican life include Life in a Mexican Village, Five Families, Pedro Martinez, and A Death in the Sanchez Family. He is also the author of La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of…