Description
Book SynopsisJohn Corry's chronicle of the Murrays and the McDonnells is the quintessential story of a successful Irish American clanperhaps the most successful in sheer numbers and influence. Thomas E. Murray, the patriarch, was born in 1860 in Albany, New York. At his death in 1929, he left $9 million, eight children, forty-eight grandchildren, and a record of industrial accomplishment ranging from 1,110 patented inventions to the consolidation of Con Edison. His faith never left him.
Murray's children, the lace curtain generation, nurtured, increased, and occasionally squandered the new wealth, made feudal marriages with the offspring of other Irish climbers, built great houses on Fifth Avenue and the shore, and a tight, exclusive society upon the twin rocks of Catholicism and respectability.
A third generation was raised in the great houses, convent schools, and the Southampton compound (prototype for the parvenu Kennedys' in Hyannis). Their inevitable entry into secular societ
