The Life of Robert Noble Burgess

The Life of Robert Noble Burgess is about a Canadian immigrant who came to California in 1884 at six years of age. An autodidact with an eighth-grade education he became a successful land investor, builder, shipbuilder, and financier during the early decades of the twentieth century. His life was a life in two arcs; one characterized by great financial and commercial success, with attendant wealth and social standing, all lost in a financial collapse, and effective banishment from his peer group, in his early forties. The second half of his life saw his considerable energies and talents devoted to a decades-long, mostly unsuccessful, attempt at reconstituting what he had lost. It is a story of a young man’s ambition, energy, talent, pride, hubris, overconfidence, and collapse in the geopolitical, social, and financial contagion surrounding World War I, and a study of both America and California. Burgess’ story is relevant today because he was a precursor of a type, an early twentieth century example of what came to be a hyper-driven, young financier who used his native understanding of economics and finance to give him a leg up on his competitors. Unfortunately, a combination of his own flaws and economic and social events far beyond his ability to control, resulted in his losing almost everything he had worked to achieve in his professional life.