John Seabrook, THE SPINACH KING: The Rise and Fall of An American Dynasty

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Great Migration Black laborers struck against the company for better wages in the 1930s, and Japanese Americans helped found a “global village” on the farm after World War II. Revealing both C. F. and Jack Seabrook’s corruption, The Spinach King undermines the “great man” theory of industrial progress. It also shows how American farms evolved from Jeffersonian smallholdings to gigantic agribusinesses, and what such enormous firms do to the families whose fate is bound up in the land. A compulsively readable story of class and privilege, betrayal and revenge―three decades in the making―The Spinach King explores the author’s complicated family legacy and the dark corners of the American Dream.

John Seabrook has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than three decades. The Spinach King is his fifth book. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

"As sweeping in its scope as a great novel, The Spinach King is . . . a rich story, populated with characters that will stay with you long after you finish reading."
― Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book

"John Seabrook’s patrimony was an agricultural empire, or at least the story of it. Like all empires, it was built by brute force. John Seabrook pulls no punches in detailing his forebears’ unsavory deeds."
― Russell Shorto, author of Taking Manhattan

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