The Sugar King of California: The Life of Claus Spreckels

Join author and historian Sandra Bonura in conversation online on her new book, The Sugar King of California: The Life of Claus Spreckels.

The Sugar King of California is the astonishingly intimate story of one of the most controversial entrepreneurs of the 19th century – a rule-breaking visionary who through his sugar empire became one of the richest Americans in history alongside John D. Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates. Bonura tells the rags-to-riches story of Spreckels’s role in the developments of the sugarcane industry in the American West and across the Pacific, triumphing in a milieu rife with cronyism and corruption and ultimately transforming California’s industry & labor. But there’s always a cost for single-minded determination; the legendary family quarrels even included a murder charge. Spreckels’s biography is one of business triumph & tragedy, a portrait of a family torn apart by money, jealousy, and ego.