David Cannadine of the University of London and National Portrait Gallery (London) will deliver the October Bradley Lecture.

Having learned the values of self-sufficiency and accumulation of wealth in nineteenth-century Pittsburgh, Andrew Mellon rose to become one of America’s greatest financiers. Despite painful shyness and personal misery—his loveless marriage ended in a scandalous divorce—he built a mighty and diverse fortune, tracking America’s course to global economic supremacy. As Treasury secretary under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, he ran the federal government like a business—prefiguring the public official as CEO—and won credit for the Roaring Twenties. But Mellon would stay on too long: blamed for the Great Depression, he eventually found himself a broken icon, his every fiscal assumption overthrown by the New Deal. Prosecuted by President Franklin Roosevelt’s government for tax evasion, Mellon would not abandon his last dream—to make a great gift to America—but he died before his National Gallery of Art in England was realized.

The issues he confronted concerning government, business, influence, the individual, and public good are still with us. David Cannadine’s biography of Andrew Mellon brings to life this towering, controversial figure, casting new light on our national history.

David Cannadine is the editor and author of many acclaimed books, including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, which won the Lionel Trilling Prize and the Governors' Award. He has taught at Cambridge and Columbia Universities, and is now the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He is also chairman of the trustees of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, and is a regular commentator on radio and television.