The Beneficiary Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father

Janny Scott's investment banker great-grandfather built an eight-hundred-acre estate on Philadelphia's Main Line. There was an obligation to protect it, a license to enjoy it, a duty to pass it on - but it was impossible to know in advance how all that extraordinary good fortune might influence the choices made over a lifetime. In this warmly felt tale of an American family's fortunes, journalist Janny Scott excavates the rarefied world that shaped her charming, unknowable father, Robert Montgomery Scott. The book is an incisive look at the weight of inheritance, the tenacity of addiction, and the power of buried secrets.