Susan B. Anthony called her the ideal business woman of whom she had dreamed fifty years earlier. Playwright Eugene O’Neill saw her as the symbol of greed and emasculating ambition. Kate Gleason, groundbreaking nineteenth-century industrialist, mechanical engineer, and real estate developer, was her own best invention. The truth of her dynamic life, in all of its complexity, is revealed in Janis Gleason’s biography of this legendary American woman.