The place was Manhattan, where none were more despised than Germans, and there the man who called himself a farmer planted the seeds of a legend that still lives nearly one and one-half centuries later. Though he could not write, Heinrich Steinweg soon changed his name to Henry Steinway and gave that name to a piano and the future. D.W. Fostle tells the Steinway saga from the perspective of the men who created, expanded, and preserved the legend. Drawing on thousands of pages of diaries, correspondence, private day books, financial records, and long-lost court documents, this book brings its readers into the inner council of a renowned family, there to meet not only the great but also the forgotten and the infamous. Set in a Darwinian world of competition without rules, this is a story of success, the price paid, the sacrifices made, and the impact of a single family on American culture.