On the last night of January 1905, Hyde gave one of the most fabulous balls of the Gilded Age. Falsely accused of charging the party to his company, he was sucked into a maelstrom of allegations of corporate malfeasance that involved the era's most famous financiers and industrialists. The shocking revelations that followed commanded hundreds of front-page stories and led to a government investigation that became a nationwide obsession and changed the law.

Set against a backdrop of magnificence, excess, and corrupting glamour, "After the Ball"'s themes are stunningly fresh: greed and chicanery, flawed love between fathers and sons, and contradictory American attitudes about wealth.