Letters and More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

Letters and More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son presents George Horace Lorimer’s famous Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son and its lesser known but equally brilliant sequel, More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.   


With his unique dry wit, Lorimer lampoons the attitudes of the newly moneyed classes of the Gilded Age – characters straight out of The Great Gatsby – in a series of fictional exchanges between John ‘Old Gorgon’ Graham, a prosperous pork-packer in Chicago, and his son, Pierrepont, whom he ‘affectionately’ calls ‘Piggy.’


The letters of Book 1 (Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son) are from a father to a son in college (Harvard) but in the sequel (More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son) Pierrepont has graduated and is writing to his old man to see if there is any work for him in the family business. The Gorgon is reluctant but thinks there might be an opportunity for Piggy in the lard department…


“One of the under-rated masterpieces of early American literature. ” - F. R. Brown.