An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew
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Book details
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synopsis book
The true story of a girl from the wilderness settlements of a burgeoning new America who became one of the most privileged figures of the Gilded Age.
Born to a pioneering family in Upstate New York in the late 1800s, Allene Tew was beautiful, impetuous, and frustrated by the confines of her small hometown. At eighteen, she met Tod Hostetter at a local dance, having no idea that the mercurial charmer she would impulsively wed was heir to one of the wealthiest families in America. But when he died twelve years later, Allene packed her bags for New York City. Never once did she look back.
From the vantage point of the American upper class, Allene embodied the tumultuous Gilded Age. Over the course of four more marriages, she weathered personal tragedies during World War I and the catastrophic financial reversals of the crash of 1929. From the castles and châteaus of Europe, she witnessed the Russian Revolution and became a princess. And from the hopes of a young girl from Jamestown, New York, Allene Tew would become the epitome of both a pursuer and survivor of the American Dream.
From the Editor
From a young age, we Americans are instilled with the dream that we can achieve anything, if only we work hard enough. You could be an entrepreneur, an astronaut…you could even grow up to marry a prince. After all, it happened to Allene Tew, a rural all-American girl who, in the late 1900s, reinvented herself first as a high society New York doyenne and then as European royalty.
Allene is the real-life heroine of the biography An American Princess, an incredible rags-to-riches story that takes us around the world—through world wars, the soaring and crashing of financial markets, and the great flu pandemic. Neither her wealth nor connections sheltered Allene from death, divorce, or the economic turmoil that was endemic at the turn of the twentieth century.
Through it all, however, Allene made the most of her opportunities and refused to succumb to depression or despair. Allene’s letters frequently proclaimed that we must have “courage all the time,” a motto that still rings out to me when I need it most, even long after I’ve closed the book.
Author Annejet van der Zijl—dubbed “Queen of Literary Nonfiction” in her native Netherlands—is a masterful storyteller who both gives us the historical context of the era and makes the personalities come to life. An American Princess has thrilled over two hundred thousand readers in the original Dutch. It’s a genuine pleasure to bring this author to an English-speaking audience and reintroduce her subject, Allene Tew, to her countrymen and women.
Allene is the real-life heroine of the biography An American Princess, an incredible rags-to-riches story that takes us around the world—through world wars, the soaring and crashing of financial markets, and the great flu pandemic. Neither her wealth nor connections sheltered Allene from death, divorce, or the economic turmoil that was endemic at the turn of the twentieth century.
Through it all, however, Allene made the most of her opportunities and refused to succumb to depression or despair. Allene’s letters frequently proclaimed that we must have “courage all the time,” a motto that still rings out to me when I need it most, even long after I’ve closed the book.
Author Annejet van der Zijl—dubbed “Queen of Literary Nonfiction” in her native Netherlands—is a masterful storyteller who both gives us the historical context of the era and makes the personalities come to life. An American Princess has thrilled over two hundred thousand readers in the original Dutch. It’s a genuine pleasure to bring this author to an English-speaking audience and reintroduce her subject, Allene Tew, to her countrymen and women.
