Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

Titan is the most ambitious and most comprehensive biography of John D. Rockefeller ever written. As he explains in the book’s foreword, Chernow had access to the Rockefeller Archive Center, “the repository of millions of family documents” (xiv). This access allowed Chernow to undertake a biographical project of unprecedented scope and focus.

Chernow was initially reluctant to write about Rockefeller. Existing studies and biographies, nearly all of which were published during Rockefeller’s lifetime or shortly after his death, betray intense personal or ideological agendas. Detractors such as Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida Tarbell depicted Rockefeller as the embodiment of everything evil in American economic life. On the other hand, family-sponsored biographies read as hagiographic, or excessively flattering, and thus absurdly shallow. Whether fawning or critical, these books “have been marred by a numbing repetition,” as if the reader is “sitting through the same play over and over again, albeit from slightly different seats in the theater” (xiv). For reasons both personal and political, these earlier authors made no effort to achieve balance or depth.

The Rockefeller Archive, however, allowed Chernow to write the kind of book about Rockefeller that no other biographer has yet attempted: a study of the inner man.