David Nasaw's biography of William Ran dolph Hearst, for which he was awarded the Bancroft Prize for 2001, was exhaustively re searched and detailed. In the case of Hearst, that approach makes sense. Much has been written about him, but Nasaw's account is clearly the most scholarly and authoritative. He established a record of the life of an impor tant, if exceptionally unattractive, business person. The problem with Nasaw's biography of Andrew Carnegie is that he takes the same approach to the story of a more complicated man about whom we already know a great deal. In this case, is the biographer's assign ment still to establish the factual
