Hetty Howland Green (1834-1916), born Hetty Howland Robinson, and known in her later years as “The Witch of Wall Street”, was born in the whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts to Quaker parents. This biography charts Hetty Green’s extraordinary ascent up the pyramid of wealth to a point where, in the earliest years of the twentieth century, she was being identified as the richest woman in America.

Part of a series of brief biographies of significant tycoons, this is an insight into the life and methods of one of the earliest and most influential businesswomen in the US. It examines the source of her wealth, and her method of building upon that.  It also profiles those who helped or thwarted her along the way.

130 pages. Includes a family tree, further reading, timeline and index.

The author looks beyond the caricature image of a person in the public eye and aims to reveal the actual person under consideration. Hetty’s public image, in later years at least, possessed some elements of her true nature, but it omitted many important aspects that were obscure (or in some cases, even deliberately opaque, rendered so not least by Hetty herself, for reasons of her own). She was certainly no saint (as she herself would have been among the first to admit, though perhaps not the very first) but nor was she a financial demoness. She probably was, however, in her day the richest woman in America, and possibly in the world, possessing when she died a personal fortune of at least $100 million, most of which she had accumulated by herself.

Unlike many of the tycoons of her day, Hetty did not create vast new industries, or play a significant role in world events. The bulk of her fortune ultimately but quietly found its way into the coffers of various charities and she left no monuments to her memory such as the palatial mansions of the Vanderbilts or the well-endowed educational institutions of Andrew Carnegie. Instead, Hetty’s life itself stands as her memorial, an example (admittedly a rare one) of a woman of the Victorian era steadily, methodically, even sometimes stubbornly, creating a multimillion fortune regardless of the views of others, and doing so in a world where many would have thought such a feat impossible, at least before Hetty achieved it.