1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History

Andrew Ross Sorkin, the New York Times financial journalist and author of Too Big to Fail, turns his narrative gifts toward the most consequential market collapse in American history. 1929 is a deeply reported, character-driven account of the months leading up to and through the crash, built on newly uncovered documents and historical records. Published by Crown in 2025, it was a New York Times Notable Book, one of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2025, and named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, TIME, and The Economist.

Sorkin's argument is not simply that greed caused the crash. He shows how an entire ecosystem of incentives, beliefs, and institutional failures made the disaster not just possible but, in retrospect, nearly inevitable. The personalities he uncovers, visionaries and fraudsters, cautious skeptics dismissed as cranks, titans who fell from grace, are rendered with the same forensic precision that made his 2008 crisis account a landmark. The parallels to contemporary markets are neither forced nor subtle: Sorkin makes them explicit, and they are uncomfortable in the best way.

For faculty in economics, financial history, and business, this book is an accessible yet intellectually serious classroom text. It works in courses on financial crises, economic history, or behavioral economics, and it speaks directly to students trying to understand how rational actors collectively produce irrational outcomes. For historians and social scientists more broadly, it raises important questions about institutional memory, regulatory capture, and the political economy of financial oversight that remain unresolved today.