Every Man a Speculator [antikvár]

Preface I spent many years as a book editor. One thing editors do is come up with book ideas and ideas about who might write them. I should begin then by thanking all those people who turned me down over the years when I approached them with the idea of writing a cultural history of Wall Street. They were invariably polite. "Thank you but no, thank you," they would say, often alluding to the amorphous open-endedness of such a project. So when my work life veered away from publishing, there the project still stood, an idea without an author. Where others had refrained, I leapt reck-lessly ahead, probably because I had fewer options. Anyway, were it not for their restraint and wisdom, I wouldn't be writing this preface. Wisdom it was, however. If you set out to write a history of Wall Street that aims to explain its economie evolution and impact, to describe the legendary "frenzy of the trading floor," to depict the lives of its outsize heroes and villains, you've bitten off a mouthful. But at least you're on familiar terrain with known borders. If, however, you decide instead to chronicle the way Wall Street—both as a real and metaphorical place— has penetrated the cultural interior of a people—well, the roadmaps are harder to find. Almost anything from a poem to a presidential address to a television sitcom is grist for that mill. At the end of the day, who's to say what belongs and what doesn't belong in such a cultural history. At sea without a compass one looks for signs of land or points of light. My most eneompassing debt therefore is to all those scholars and writers whose works I have picked through looking for material that I might recycle according to some design of my own. I only hope that the endnotes con-vey some sense of how indebted I am to those who came before me, whose own work may have had little or nothing at all to do with a cultural histo-