A Hazard of New Fortunes
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This novel offers a penetrating and humane portrait of Gilded Age America, exploring timeless questions about money, morality, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world.
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Book Summary
Basil and Isabel March leave Boston for New York City after Basil loses his insurance job and accepts an editorship of a new literary magazine. The novel explores their adjustment to urban life, the magazine's conflicts between art and commerce, and the social tensions of Gilded Age America.
Basil March, a middle-aged Bostonian, loses his insurance job and is recruited by Fulkerson to edit a new cooperative magazine, Every Other Week, funded by wealthy natural gas magnate Mr. Dryfoos. After initial hesitation, the Marches move to New York, where they confront the city's scale, diversity, and real estate challenges. The magazine brings together a diverse staff, including the idealistic German immigrant Lindau and the artist Beaton. Tensions escalate when Dryfoos's son Conrad, a religious idealist, dies in a streetcar strike, and Lindau is fatally injured. Dryfoos, consumed by grief and guilt, attempts to atone by holding Lindau's funeral at his home and offering March and Fulkerson control of the magazine. Beaton, rejected by Alma Leighton, pursues Christine Dryfoos but is violently rebuffed. The Dryfoos family departs for Europe, and the Marches take over the magazine, implementing reforms. The novel concludes with the Marches reflecting on their new life and the moral compromises they have witnessed.
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Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
Angus Beaton
Beaton drifts through the drawing rooms and studios of New York as a man of taste, talent, and no fixed purpose, courted by Fulkerson for the art department of Every Other Week even as he sneers at the enterprise. His on-again, off-again entanglement with Miss Leighton exposes the gap between his aesthetic ideals and his willingness to commit to anything or anyone. He matters because his refusal to be practical tests whether the magazine — and the people around him — can tolerate genius that won't be managed.
Basil March
March leaves a comfortable, book-lined existence for the uncertain prospect of Every Other Week, drawn by Fulkerson's enthusiasm and his own unfulfilled ambitions. He is thoughtful, self-aware, and quietly torn between his aesthetic scruples and the commercial machinery that pays for them. His divided conscience — about art, money, and the people the magazine drags into its orbit — makes him the novel's central lens on the moral weather of the enterprise.
Mrs. March
Isabel March presides over the family's refined household and its move to New York with a mixture of wifely loyalty and unillusioned judgment. She takes Fulkerson's side against her husband's scruples, dismisses the notion of an artistic career for a woman, and quietly steadies the family through each new upheaval. Her running commentary — affectionate, skeptical, sometimes startlingly conventional — gives the novel its domestic counterweight to the magazine's public dramas.
Fulkerson
Fulkerson is the engine of the whole venture: he recruits March, courts Beaton, flatters Dryfoos, and arranges the disastrous dinner that brings Lindau and the magnate under one roof. His buoyant confidence and cynical readiness to improvise make him both indispensable and dangerous. He matters because his cheerful pragmatism keeps the magazine afloat while steadily accumulating the social collisions that will test everyone involved.
Mr. Dryfoos
Dryfoos has risen from the farm to a fortune and now wants a respectable literary property to crown his success, but he cannot quite comprehend the men of ideas his money has hired. Proud, touchy, and quick to take offense — especially at Lindau's socialist outbursts — he embodies the uneasy marriage of capital and culture the magazine represents. His clash with March over who controls the editorial page forces the novel's central question of whose interests art actually serves.
Mr. Lindau
Lindau is a veteran of European revolutions and a translator of manuscripts for Every Other Week, hired out of gratitude and old friendship but incapable of softening his denunciations of the rich. His fierce, unbending socialism — a partial truth that hurts worse than the whole — turns a dinner invitation into a social explosion. He matters because his presence forces the magazine's comfortable men to confront the class contradictions they would rather keep in the abstract.
Social Class and Mobility
The book explores the tensions and conflicts between different social classes in Gilded Age New York, particularly through the Dryfoos family's rise from farming to wealth and the Marches' precarious middle-class status, highlighting the moral and psychological costs of economic ambition.
Capitalism and Moral Compromise
The narrative examines how the pursuit of wealth and success in a capitalist society forces characters to compromise their ideals, as seen in March's unease with Dryfoos's money and Fulkerson's pragmatic maneuvering, and in Lindau's radical critique of economic inequality.
Urban vs. Rural Life
The contrast between the Marches' New England roots and their new life in New York City serves as a central theme, with the city representing both opportunity and moral decay, while the countryside symbolizes lost simplicity and integrity.
Art and Commerce
The tension between artistic integrity and commercial success is embodied in the magazine Every Other Week, where characters like Beaton and March struggle to balance aesthetic ideals with the demands of the market and the whims of wealthy backers.
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