John Brooks (writer)

Brooks was married for the last 10 years of his life to the former Barbara Mahoney. He was previously married to the former Rae Everitt, with whom he had two children. He died in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, on July 27, 1993, of complications from a stroke.

Brooks did not limit his writing to business topics. In a 1983 book review in The New York Times, Brooks wrote that author David Burnham, in his The Rise of the Computer State, noted that the "apocalyptic vision" painted by writer Burnham was nearly at hand. The rise of the state's technological prowess was such, wrote Brooks, that "it is because one feels powerless against the advance of the national electronic eye and ear."

Brooks's subsequent work, The Takeover Game, limned the precincts of the greenmailers and junk bond pioneers of the 1980s. The book, noted Business Week's editor-in-chief Stephen B. Shepard in his New York Times review, managed "to be both scholarly and provocative." With his facile explanations of complex financial terms and invigorating portraits of market speculators, The Takeover Game "argues that the investment banks, motivated by huge fees, are the driving force behind the current merger mania – usually to the detriment of the commonweal. It is little more than a speculative frenzy reminiscent of the 1920s, Mr. Brooks believes, built on high-risk debt euphemistically called leverage."

Brooks also used his knowledge of business and finance to help other authors. He served as president of the Authors Guild for four years, from 1975 until 1979, and along with fellow New Yorker writer John Hersey was instrumental in creating a recommended book contract for authors. Brooks also served as vice president of PEN for four years, a vice president of the Society of American Historians and a trustee of the New York Public Library from 1978 until 1993.

As with previous market booms and busts, much of the new sober hindsight emerged from the rubble of the previous boom. Written during the recession of 1973, Time magazine's review has an eerily familiar ring. "But now that mutual funds are hemorrhaging cash and conglomerate has become a dirty word", opined Time reviewer George Church on October 29, 1973, "the story of the 1960s on Wall Street has the faraway quality of tales from 1929. As New Yorker writer John Brooks points out, the speculative excesses of the decade bore a haunting resemblance to those of the '20s, and they, too, led to a resounding market crash (in 1970) that wiped out fortunes and nearly destroyed Wall Street itself by threatening to bankrupt its biggest brokerage houses."

Brooks's account of the bull market of the 1960s in The Go-Go Years similarly delineated the personalities at the center of the action, like high-flying portfolio manager Gerald Tsai. In Brooks's retelling of the decade's events, Tsai and others correctly intuited that the ways of the Street were changing, and adjusted their trading strategies accordingly. Speculation was on the rise, Brooks noted, made easier by the new casino mentality. Writer Michael Lewis noted that Brooks's outrage at the new speculative excesses of the 1960s marked the end of an era.

In a field starved for vigorous writing, colorful characters and invigorating plot lines, Brooks's prose was seen by contemporary critics as a long-overdue tonic. But seen from today's vantage, many of Brooks's assumptions seem almost quaint, writes The New Yorker's current financial writer James Surowiecki. On reading Brooks's The Seven Fat Years several decades later, Brooks's account of the managing of General Motors's first-ever secondary offering in 1955, "the business world Brooks describes seems so oddly innocent, so unvoracious that he could just as well be talking about children playing Monopoly."

In his interviews of his subjects, and in his writing, Brooks sometimes dropped in passages from Virginia Woolf, or alluded to paintings by Marcel Duchamp or theater reviews by English critic Kenneth Tynan. In 1950, the former newsweekly writer and aspiring novelist Brooks reviewed Jack Kerouac's The Town and the City in The New York Times. Brooks subsequently reviewed The Deer Park, the new novel by writer Norman Mailer that was rejected for publication by Mailer's original publisher for obscenity. Thanks to his wide-ranging style and eclectic mind, Brooks emerged as "the only writer of business books and articles with a large and assured readership of nonprofessionals."

After leaving the military, Brooks went to work for Time magazine, where he became a contributing editor. He worked at Time for only two years, pining for a chance to write at more length and in a looser style than that dictated by the newsweekly format. In 1949, Brooks got his break. That year he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer – a development he later called the lucky break that made his career. While working at The New Yorker, Brooks also began contributing book reviews to Harper's Magazine and The New York Times Book Review.

Brooks was the author of three novels, one – The Big Wheel, published in 1949 – describing a newsmagazine much like Time. He also published ten non-fiction books on business and finance, the subject in which he specialized for The New Yorker. Brooks's best-known books were Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920–1938, about the scandal surrounding Wall Street banker Richard Whitney; The Go-Go Years, on the speculative bubble of Wall Street in the 1960s; The Takeover Game about the merger mania of the 1980s.; and of special note, Business Adventures, which has been cited as Bill Gates' favorite business book. The Go-Go Years earned Brooks the 1974 Gerald Loeb Award for Books.

Brooks's tale of easy credit, inflated egos, financial greed and the end of an era – symbolized by broker Whitney – came to be seen as one of the best accounts of the conditions which led to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. "As Mr. Brooks tells this tale of dishonor, desperation, and the fall of the mighty, it takes on overtones of Greek tragedy, a king brought down by pride. Whitney's sordid history has been told before", said The Wall Street Journal in its review. "But in Mr. Brooks's hands, the drama becomes freshly shocking."

John Brooks (December 5, 1920 – July 27, 1993) was a writer and longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine, where he worked for many years as a staff writer, specializing in financial topics. Brooks was also the author of several books, both fiction and non-fiction, the best known of which was an examination of the financial shenanigans of the 1960s Wall Street bull market.

John Nixon Brooks was born on December 5, 1920, in New York City, but grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. He graduated from Kent School in Kent, Connecticut in 1938 and Princeton University in 1942. After graduation Brooks joined the United States Army Air Forces, in which he served as a communications and radar officer from 1942 until 1945. He was aboard the First United States Army headquarters ship on D-Day during the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944.