A financial adventurer becomes a hero to some, a villain to many, and a lover to one as he buys and sells companies in a thrilling game of wits and cunning in this New York Times bestseller from the author of Executive Suite
Cash McCall is a believer in free enterprise, a man not yet forty who buys, sells, and merges companies to make huge profits in a postwar nation of conformist “company men.” McCall is an enigma who operates out of an expensive tenth-floor suite in a Philadelphia hotel that he may or may not own. He’s single, conducts secret business meetings, and is both envied and hated. No one knows where he came from.
Grant Austen spent three decades building his plastics company. Now, as he seeks counsel from his banker and lawyer about selling out, he unwittingly triggers a whirlwind of corporate and financial maneuvering he doesn’t fully understand. And his daughter, Lory, commits the cardinal sin of falling in love with Cash McCall, the man who’s about to buy her father’s company out from under him.
But who is Cash McCall? A ruthless operator or a rugged individualist? Reminiscent of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, this is a novel about love, the free enterprise system, and one man’s refusal to be anyone but himself.
Cameron Hawley (1905–1969) was simultaneously a businessman who rose through the ranks to become a top executive at Armstrong Cork Company and a prolific author of short stories and articles, which frequently appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Good Housekeeping. In his midforties, he decided to devote all of his time to writing. The result was Executive Suite, the bestselling, iconic novel about the dynamic men and women who work at the highest levels of corporate America. Executive Suite was produced as a 1954 motion picture that starred William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck, and was nominated for four Academy Awards. Hawley continued to focus on the themes of free enterprise, big-business adventurers, and the pressures of modern life in his later novels: Cash McCall, which was made into a 1960 film starring James Garner and Natalie Wood; The Lincoln Lords; and The Hurricane Years. Hawley lived for many years on a farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he enjoyed hunting and fly-fishing.