that Tarbell had an excessively narrow view of Rockefeller’s personality. It seems unlikelyas Tarbell supposedthat Rockefeller established his charitable foundations out of guilt or in an effort simply to restore the reputation Tarbell had denigrated. Rockefeller often provided funding for worthy projects without expecting publicity or any sort of public acknowledgment.

Tarbell did not merely attack Rockefeller. She acknowledged that he had done much to improve the oil business. She was not against big business per se but rather against the abuses of the capitalist system. Indeed, her reporting led to court cases and legislation that made illegal what was, in Rockefeller’s early years, only unethical.

How Rockefeller viewed himself is difficult to say since his autobiography is reticent and he left behind no documents that decisively reveal his inner life. He rarely answered his critics directly and took careas Weinberg demonstratesto make sure his name appeared on very few internal company documents. He rarely mentioned Tarbell by name, but on those few occasions when he did defend himself (he hired an interviewer for precisely this purpose), it is clear he had Tarbell in mind. At one point, he did refer to her directly, suggesting she was misguided, although he acknowledged that in some respects her book presented a favorable view of Standard Oil.

Like Rockefeller, Tarbell produced an autobiography, and yet she revealed little about her inner or private life. Why did she not marry? Did she have lovers? Neither Weinberg nor previous biographers can tell. Consequently, Tarbell, like Rockefeller, remains something of a mystery. Weinberg, a superb journalist, does not attempt to psychoanalyze his subjects or to speculate unduly about their motivations.

Weinberg began his work intending a full biography of Tarbell, but given the paucity of material about her inner life, it is understandable why he turned to this dual biography. It provides him with the opportunity to do full justice to his main story and to the events that led to the clash between Rockefeller and Tarbell.

While these two figures never met, they remained to the end of their days aware of each other. After all, Tarbell’s work influenced Theodore Roosevelt and others to condemn the monopolistic practices of Standard Oil and other trusts. In addition, Tarbell was certainly one of the principal reasons why in 1912 the Supreme Court rendered a decision that effectively broke up the Standard Oil Trust.

The irony, however, is that the breakup made Rockefeller richerthe richest man in the United States, in factbecause he had stock in all the companies carved out of the Standard Oil leviathan. Tarbell’s career flourished and Rockefeller remained the chief symbol of ravenous big business. He was never able to rectify the damage Tarbell had done to his reputation.

Weinberg shows that Tarbell’s legacy consists of much more than her classic work on Standard Oil. She not only pioneered the craft of investigative journalism but also insisted on the meticulous analysis of documents, becoming at the same time the first woman and perhaps the first journalist to join the staff of a major magazine (McClure’s) to concentrate exclusively on in-depth and well-researched articles.

For Tarbell, there was no such thing as received wisdom. She argued that reporters should begin afresh, jettisoning opinions and looking for new material. When Lincoln’s son denied her access to his father’s papers, and one of Lincoln’s secretaries, John Nicolay, rebuffed her, Tarbell pursued her own quest for documents and scoured newspapers for leads. Impressed with her efforts, the son, Robert Todd Lincoln, eventually provided some assistance, persuading sources to speak with her. In this way, Tarbell built up a network of contacts that led her to collectors of Lincoln material that had not been shared with other biographers.

Weinberg uses a phrase (the “era of heroic biography was fading”) that demarcates the changes Tarbell promulgated in American biography and journalism. He notes that she “glossed over Lincoln’s faults” but with Rockefeller she “went to great lengths to pull back the curtain.” In other words, she was on her way to making biography itself a more critical genre a full generation before iconoclasts such as Lytton Strachey would do so in Eminent Victorians (1918).

It is no longer standard practice for biographers to quote large portions of their subject’s prose. The contemporary fashion is to write swiftly moving narratives peppered with brief sound-bite quotations. Weinberg does quote a few extended passages from Tarbell, however, that reveal what a marvelous writer she remains. However much her biographies have been superseded by later research, her prose repays study. Here is just one pithy example from her McClure’s profile of Rockefeller: “Mr. Rockefeller may have made himself the richest man in the world, but he has paid. Nothing but paying ever ploughs such lines in a man’s face, ever sets his lips to such a melancholy angle.” This is a devastating portrait, combining moral judgment and observation, sound, sense, and imagery in just two sentences. The pacing of such prose never ages.

Although Tarbell could claim many “firsts” as a woman working in what was still mainly a man’s occupation, she rarely adopted a feminist viewpoint. To be sure, she wrote about women’s issues, but she was not keen, for example, on votes for women. In this respect, she took a rather staid, nineteenth century old-fashioned view of women who should shy away from the rough-and-tumble of the political world. Somehow a woman’s authority as above or beyond the fray appealed to her, although she herself hardly provided a good example. Nevertheless, she did not think women’s involvement in politics would change the world all that much.

In another sense, like Rockefeller, Tarbell remained a conventional American tied to her family. She took an active interest in her relatives and often supported them even when her income (derived solely from writing) diminished. Similarly, Rockefeller devoted himself to family, sometimes even taking part of a day off to return home and play with his children. Even though both resided in New York City for long periods, Rockefeller saw himself as rooted in the Cleveland of his youth just as Tarbell remained at heart a citizen of Titusville. Given their antagonism, it was impossible for one to see the other’s full humanity. This, however, is the work of biography, and one that Weinberg accomplishes with admirable dexterity, compassion, and perception.