Talks & Entertainment

At this in-person event (with a virtual attendance option), proof of vaccination and masks are required. Please review our health and safety protocols here.

This program does not include a book signing. All books will include autographed bookplates.

For most of his life, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper intentionally distanced himself from the Vanderbilt dynasty his mother was born into. But after Gloria Vanderbilt’s death in 2019, Cooper began going through old journals, letters, and Vanderbilt family documents his mother had stored away in long-forgotten boxes, revealing an epic American story of achievement and excess, of a staggering fortune built and squandered, of high society and salacious scandals, and of public fame and private pain.

Cooper, a great-great-great grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who died the richest man in America in 1877, tells this extraordinary family history in Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. Drawing on never-before-seen documents, the narrative spans from the eighteenth century to today, chronicling the lives of some of the most remarkable members of this famous and fractured family who re-defined conspicuous consumption.

A correspondent for CBS’s “60 Minutes,” and an eighteen-time Emmy Award winner. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Dispatches From The Edge and The Rainbow Comes and Goes, which he co-wrote with his mother. Cooper will be in conversation with Jamie Gangel, an award-winning CNN special correspondent and former NBC “Today Show” National Correspondent.