Rugged Individual

AMERICAN NABOB--Holmes Alexander --Harper ($2.50).

At 24, two years out of Princeton, Holmes Moss Alexander was elected to the Maryland Legislature. There he found no cause to doubt "the basic assumption of professional lobbying, that every man has his price or his weakness," soon committed political suicide by saying: "The way we made swag of the taxpayers' money was little short of piracy." His brief experience as a legislator stood him in good stead when he came to write his second novel, American Nabob.

Author Alexander, better known for biography (Aaron Burr, Martin Van Buren) has shown he can write a rousing account of the rousing Civil War period without depending on battle scenes for his excitement. American Nabob reads like a political biography full of interesting scandal. Chief figure is fictional Curtis Larkins, a wildcat country banker who modeled himself on Henry Clay and Napoleon, grabbed a mountain region full of coal and oil during the Civil War's confusion, developed it afterwards with rugged individualism.

Like the English adventurers in India for whom the term nabob was invented, craggy-nosed Banker Larkins had little trouble getting his actions legalized. He never held office himself (for $100,000 in 1875 he could have been appointed Senator from West Virginia), instead let others do his dirty work. He was the biggest frog in his puddle until a bigger, ruggeder individual--spare, pale-eyed, nonfictional John D. Rockefeller--splashed down beside him. Mr. Rockefeller wanted Mr. Larkins' refineries. "The Standard Oil Company has been called a combination," said Rockefeller's envoy. "We prefer the word alliance. We have been accused of monopoly, but a better term is unity." After a price war, Banker Larkins saw the point.

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