Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel by Thomas W. Lawson

Description

Thomas W. Lawson remains the only man ever to have written bestsellers about the high finance of his day and to have been, at the same time, one of its principal operators. A self-made Boston stock manipulator who had become a millionaire in copper and then a famous reformer, he knew the panic of 1907 from the inside — and he wrote Friday, the Thirteenth with that knowledge burning in every page. Its hero is a great speculator who decides to bring the bulls to ruin, and the novel’s fascination lies in watching a man who has seen the machine run decide to break it.

The book opens in the protagonist’s office, with the ticker disgorging crisis: “Friday, the 13th; I thought as much. If Bob has started, there will be hell.” Lawson’s eye for the atmosphere of the trading room — the tape, the telephones, the messengers, the faces across the street — gives the story a documentary intensity that no later novelist of Wall Street could fake. The centerpiece is the engineered stock-market massacre of a Friday the thirteenth, a set piece of financial catastrophe written, remarkably, by a man who had helped cause such massacres.

Beneath the spectacle runs a genuine critique of the men who played with other people’s fortunes. Lawson had made and lost millions in the very games he describes, and his contempt for the speculators’ world is that of a disillusioned initiate. The result is a thriller and a scandal sheet and a warning, all in one breathless volume.

Why readers pick it up

• A panoramic early novel of Wall Street written by a man who was there.
• The engineered Friday-the-thirteenth crash, one of the great set-pieces of financial fiction.
• Prophetic about every market panic that followed.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition delivers the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and chapter navigation optimized for phone, tablet, and e-reader.