In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth?

Margalit Fox originally trained as a cellist and a linguist before pursuing journalism. As a senior writer in the New York Times’s Obituary News Department, she wrote front-page public sendoffs for some of the leading cultural figures of our age. Winner of the William Saroyan Prize for Literature and author of four previous books, The Confidence Men, Conan Doyle for the Defense, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, and Talking Hands, Fox lives in Manhattan with her husband.