Titan Read-AlongFollow Rockefeller's world as it widens from upstate villages to oil fields, courtrooms, estates, and foundations. Each chapter keeps to what the book has revealed so far: the people who matter most, placed where their lives press hardest on the story.
Chapter 1: The Flimflam Man1830s-1840The story begins not with oil, but with a marriage of opposites in rural New York: Bill Rockefeller, exuberant and slippery, and Eliza Davison, grave, devout, and inwardly disciplined. Into that unstable household John Davison Rockefeller is born.
William Avery Rockefeller Sr.John's father, restless peddler and household enigma
Known up to this chapter
- He enters as a man of appetite and motion, selling cures, stories, and himself with equal assurance.
- His courtship of Eliza Davison joins charm to danger: he can fascinate a room, but cannot be made steady by it.
- Before John can remember him, Bill has already made absence one of the household's governing facts.