Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

Anderson Cooper’s primary credentials for writing the history of the Astors come from his journalistic training. His knack for storytelling and critical engagement with people and sources has kept him at the top of his profession. However, this project is very personal for him as well. In the Introduction, Cooper writes that Astor grew out of his earlier collaboration with Katherine Howe on Vanderbilt, a book he wanted to write after the passing of his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, to explain his own family’s history for his two sons, Wyatt and Sebastian. Cooper has said that, as a gay man, for a long time he believed he never would have any children, so their existence in his life has extra meaning for him as he thinks about the legacy that he wants to pass on to them. The Vanderbilt legacy is a complicated one for the Cooper family: “‘There were statues of my great-great-great grandfather [Cornelius] in New York,’ Cooper said in 2006. ‘I actually thought as a kid that everyone’s grandparents turned into a statue when they died’” (Burnet, Jane. “Five Surprising Facts About Anderson Cooper.” Oprah Daily, 14 April 2024). This childhood misconception illustrates the weight of family heritage for descendants of the Vanderbilts like the Coopers. The story of the Astor family is a fitting sequel since their buildings, like the statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt, are part of the fabric of Cooper’s home city of New York.

Cooper’s book Vanderbilt follows his family legacy in one way beyond merely tracing his family. His mother wrote her own memoir, It Seemed Important at the Time, as had his father, Wyatt Cooper. Anderson Cooper especially valued his father’s book, Families, after Wyatt passed as “a letter to me from him” (Burnet), and wanted to leave his own sons the same kind of enduring connection. His first book, Dispatches from the Edge (2006), summarized his reporting, but he did not turn to writing another book until it came to family. As his mother neared the end of her life, they exchanged emails that became their coauthored book The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss (2017). He followed this with 2021’s Vanderbilt in collaboration with Katherine Howe.

Both Howe and Cooper enjoyed their collaboration and decided to do another project. Howe suggested the Astors as a subject that would generate interest similar to Vanderbilt and would have some personal connection for Cooper. As Cooper describes their writing process, “Katherine does most of the initial historical research, then we divide up time periods—which chapters each of us will write separately” (Ianzito, Christina. “Anderson Cooper on the Rise and Fall of the Astors.” AARP, 19 Sept. 2023). Although Katherine Howe does not hold a degree in history, her interdisciplinary degrees gave her some historical training that she has used in her novels and brings to her partnership with Cooper. Some have critiqued their final product, Astor, for relying on only a handful of sources, most of them books written by other historians rather than primary sources from the time. Cooper has responded that they rigorously cited all the information they borrowed and that provides evidence of their work. In the end, Cooper and Howe did not produce a scholarly history but rather something else of value—a breezy and lively overview of what makes the Astor family interesting and illustrative of American history.