Burton J. Hendrick's two-volume biography, first published in 1932 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1933, was the first major scholarly treatment of Carnegie's life and the standard account for nearly forty years. Hendrick, a journalist and historian who had access to Carnegie's papers and surviving associates, wrote at a time when the Homestead strike was still within living memory, and his narrative — sympathetic to Carnegie yet not uncritical — shaped the public image of the steelmaster for generations before being superseded by Joseph Frazier Wall (1970) and David Nasaw (2006).
As the first comprehensive biography written with access to Carnegie's inner circle, Hendrick captured details and perspectives later biographers necessarily processed through additional layers of interpretation. For founders, the value is in seeing how a contemporary — not a modern historian applying twenty-first-century judgments — made sense of Carnegie's contradictions: the cost-obsessed industrialist who crushed the Homestead union and the systematic philanthropist who gave away $350 million to build libraries. Hendrick's Pulitzer Prize attests to the narrative power of the telling, and his proximity to the events gives his account a texture that later, more definitive biographies cannot replicate. The book is also a primary document of how successful industrialists were understood in the generation immediately following the Gilded Age — a perspective founders rarely encounter in modern business literature.