Pride’s Castle

by Frank Yerby

First published 1949

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3.7(255)

Pride Dawson arrives in New York in 1870 determined to force his way into a world of money and social power. He treats finance, marriage and personal loyalty as parts of the same contest, building a fortune while his relationships with Sharon and the wealthy Esther expose the private costs of his appetite for status.
The novel follows the emergence of a new American elite in the decades after the Civil War, when speculation, corporate wealth and aggressive entrepreneurship could create fortunes faster than older social hierarchies could absorb them. Yerby turns the Gilded Age city into a landscape of class mobility and moral compromise, contrasting lavish success with the human damage caused by treating people and institutions as instruments of ambition.