Wall Street

Wall Street, narrow thoroughfare of New York City, situated in lower Manhattan, received its name from a stockade erected there by Stuyvesant. It has long been the greatest financial district of the U.S., and by extension the name implies international corporate finance. During the 19th century, it was the center of operations for such celebrated financiers as Vanderbilt, Drew, and Morgan. There has been a great deal of literature making use of Wall Street as setting or subject. Its appearance in fiction includes several novels by Richard B. Kimball, Brander Matthews's His Father's Son, Joaquin Miller's melodramatic The Destruction of Gotham, and a trilogy by Charles Dudley Warner. Other literature about Wall Street includes Bronson Howard's satirical play The Henrietta; E.C. Stedman's whimsical poem Pan in Wall Street, in which Pan visits the “bulls” and “bears” of the street, but is removed by a blue‐coated policeman; and more recently The Big Money and other novels by Dos Passos, the novels The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss and The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, as well as nonfictional studies, including The Robber Barons by Matthew Josephson.