1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

Andrew Ross Sorkin (b. 1977) is an American journalist and financial historian who brings a post-2008 crisis perspective to the historical events of 1929. Brought up in New York City as the son of a lawyer, Sorkin specialized in finance journalism from a young age, winning an internship at The New York Times at age 18. He followed this with a degree in communications from Cornell University, joining The New York Times permanent staff in 1999.

Sorkin’s decades of professional experience in investigative financial journalism are brought to bear in 1929, especially in creating a technically detailed account intended to be accessible to a general audience. This background is also seen in the book’s subject matter and investigative stance. As a longtime financial columnist for The New York Times, the founder of its DealBook platform, and a co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box, Sorkin has built a career reporting on high-stakes finance and its key decision-makers. He has often broken important stories on market events, such a mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies. More recently, Sorkin has concentrated on corporate tax practices, both evasion and avoidance. All these subjects are essential ingredients in1929’s historical account and argument.

Similarly, Sorkin’s previous book, Too Big to Fail (2009), offered a granular account of the 2008 financial crisis, establishing his methodological approach of blending detailed reporting with narrative tension. For 1929, Sorkin applies this same lens to a more distant past, using newly surfaced archives, private letters, and confidential board minutes to reconstruct the 1929 crash but as a human drama driven by ambition, fear, and institutional failure.

In both books, Sorkin’s motivation is to learn from mistakes to find durable lessons about governance, systemic risk, and leadership. In the Preface to 1929, he writes, “By understanding the motivations and disparate stories of the central actors, we can begin to understand how this calamity happened […] that’s where the responsibility lies, and where the lessons remain” (x). This focus on collective agency and accountability shapes the book’s narrative, moving away from macro-economic explanations to explore how personal conflicts and psychological pressures contributed to systemic breakdown. In this, Sorkin positions himself as both an investigative reporter and a historian, seeking to connect archival storytelling to contemporary policy debates about the ethics and purpose of the financial sector, including corporate and market regulation.