Download Audiobook The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home by Denise Kiernan in English

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From the creator of the New York Occasions bestseller The Women of Atomic Metropolis comes the fascinating true story behind the magnificent Gilded Age mansion Biltmore – the most important, grandest residence ever in-built the USA. Orphaned at a younger age, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser claimed lineage from one among New York’s greatest identified households. She grew up in Newport and Paris, and her engagement and marriage to George Vanderbilt was one of the watched occasions of Gilded Age society. However none of this ready her to be mistress of Biltmore Home. Earlier than their marriage, the rich and bookish Vanderbilt had devoted his life to making a spectacular European-style property on 125,000 acres of North Carolina wilderness. He summoned the well-known panorama architect Frederick Regulation Olmsted to tame the grounds, collaborated with celebrated architect Richard Morris Hunt to construct a 175,000-square-foot chateau, crammed it with priceless artwork and antiques, and erected a captivating village past the gates. Newlywed Edith was now mistress of an property practically thrice the dimensions of Washington, DC and benefactress of the village and surrounding rural space. When fortunes shifted and altering occasions threatened her household, her dwelling, and her neighborhood, it was as much as Edith to avoid wasting Biltmore – and safe the way forward for the area and her husband’s legacy. The story of Biltmore spans World Wars, the Jazz Age, the Melancholy, and generations of the well-known Vanderbilt household, and encompasses a charming solid of real-life characters together with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Teddy Roosevelt, John Singer Sargent, James Whistler, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. The Final Fortress is the distinctive American story of how the most important home in America flourished, faltered, and in the end endured to at the present time.