Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

George Horace Lorimer wrote these letters in the voice of John Graham, a self-made Chicago pork-packer known on the exchange as Old Gorgon Graham, writing to his son Pierrepont from the day the young man leaves for Harvard. Across the correspondence the father hands out blunt, funny advice on money, work, marriage, spending, and character, all of it salted with barnyard proverbs and stories drawn from his own climb out of poverty. As Pierrepont drifts through college and then joins the family firm, his father keeps prodding him toward common sense and honest effort. First serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1901 and 1902, the book became a runaway bestseller, and its plain-spoken business wisdom still reads as sharp and quotable more than a century on.