A single person clapped and, realizing they were all alone, stopped.

Mr. Shanks continued, “It exudes the grandeur of Gotham and the dazzle of the iconic Mad Men design gone modern.” Mr. Shanks cleared his throat. “It’s really amazing.”

Last Monday, a group (of “top hotel and publishing executives as well as media industry influencers,” per a press release) was gathered at a private party to celebrate the grand reopening of the gut-renovated hotel and the launch of its new partnership with Penguin Books.

Scheduled to coincide with Book Expo America, a massive publishing trade show that forces attendees to trudge all the way to 11th Ave., three evening readings and panels were to take place in the lobby.

These readings, called the Penguin Preview Series at the Round Table, will continue on a quarterly basis. Another aspect of the new partnership is the Night-table Reading promotion, in which books and galleys from Penguin’s recent releases will be distributed to hotel guests each night.

It’s all a concerted effort to reclaim the “rich literary history” (a phrase repeated ad nauseum through the night) of the hotel, where, during the 1920s, the Algonquin Round Table met for lunch to exchange jokes and barbs, where The New Yorker was born in 1925, and where Dorothy Parker said that thing about leading a horticulture (you can’t make her think).

Penguin authors abounded: Elizabeth Gilbert, Ron Chernow and Simon Doonan milled around, Rachel Dratch chatted with John Hodgman in another corner, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, who dropped by on the late side.

We asked Mr. Hodgman if a literary salon could be revived in this way. Can there be another Algonquin Round Table?

“Salon culture still exists, but it’s online now. Writers don’t need to get together in an actual place any more,” Mr. Hodgman mused. “Though writers would benefit from a meeting place, because there would be alcohol and table service. Writers love hotels because they are the living rooms they cannot afford themselves.”

Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz responded to the same question with characteristic flourish, but no optimism. “An incubator for personalities supremely attuned to this socio-cultural moment—it would be a wonderful thing for human circuitry. But communities have diffused and moved into the thinnest splinters,” he said.

Marion Meade, biographer of Algonquin patron sinner Dorothy Parker, clutched a glass of white wine with both hands, and proudly gestured toward one of her books, displayed in a glass cabinet in the lobby.

When asked if the spirit of the place could be revived simply by hosting readings and stuffing a new novel next to the Bible in each bedside drawer, Ms. Meade replied with an acerbic pragmatism.

“They are probably the only hotel in New York that has this kind of literary history. If they don’t use it, they’re pretty stupid, and they’re not stupid. Whether they can keep it up with Penguin, who knows, but I give them credit for trying.”

What would Dorothy Parker think of this latest campaign to capitalize upon the hotel’s literary pedigree?

“She’d think it was bullshit,” came the answer.

"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be." This sentiment, which Ron Chernow borrows as an epigraph for his engrossing biography of the most brilliant and charismatic of the Founders, reveals Alexander Hamilton as the highly articulate philosopher of American realism. He never wallowed in the seductive waters of American exceptionalism, which too often saw the new republic as another Eden, free from the corruptions of Europe and chosen by God to lead the world. In The Federalist Papers , he asked: "Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?" At a time when the Bush administration has embarked on an imperial mission-with the President declaiming, "We are changing the world"-Hamilton's cautionary words are just what we need.

The roots of Hamilton's realism lie in his childhood. It's hard to imagine anyone with his unpromising start rising to such great heights in so short a time. He was born on the West Indian island of Nevis in 1755. His father, James Hamilton, the impoverished fourth son of a Scottish laird, sought his fortune in the West Indies but failed to prosper. There he met Rachel Faucette, whose father was a French Huguenot, and they produced two children, James and Alexander. Rachel had been previously married, and though she'd divorced her husband, she never married Hamilton's father. The social stigma of illegitimate birth forever shadowed Alexander's life. The family settled on the island of St. Croix, but when James Jr. was 12 and Alexander 10, their father deserted them. It's likely that Alexander never saw his father again, though they corresponded from time to time.

His mother supported the family by running a shop, and Alexander probably went to school nearby. When Hamilton was 12, however, she died of an unspecified disease. Even the meager living she'd secured from the shop was taken away when her first husband reappeared and was awarded what was left of her estate. At 14, Alexander found himself a penniless orphan.

Aware of the travails that the Hamiltons had undergone, local merchants decided to apprentice the older boy to a carpenter, while Alexander, already known for his quick intelligence, was sent to work as a clerk in an export-import house. He was also taken in by a benevolent merchant, who may well have been his real father. The most persuasive evidence of this is the startling resemblance of Alexander to Edward Stevens, the merchant's son, who became Hamilton's best friend.

It soon became evident that Hamilton was a remarkably gifted boy who complemented his studies with omnivorous reading; he was a true autodidact. He was also showing signs of becoming a gifted writer, sending poems to the local newspaper and later a highly colored description of a hurricane in a letter to his father, a copy of which fell into the hands of a Presbyterian minister. The preacher decided that Hamilton should be sent to America to further his education. A subscription fund was organized by the leading citizens of St. Croix to send Hamilton to New York, and at 17 he boarded a ship for America, never to return.

What he could not leave behind were vivid memories of the brutal treatment accorded the slaves who were imported from Africa to cut sugar cane. As a result of what he saw growing up, Hamilton became an avowed abolitionist, eventually joining the New York Manumission Society.

Four years after he'd arrived in New York, after a little more than two years studying at King's College (now Columbia University), Hamilton dropped out to become a captain of an artillery company, distinguishing himself in the battle of New York and later, when he supported Washington in crossing the Delaware River to engage the Hessians at Trenton.

Washington admired the exploits of the young soldier, and was aware, also, of his gifts as a writer. He invited the 22-year-old to join his staff as an aide-de-camp, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In less than five years, Hamilton had risen from a lowly clerk in St. Croix to become the equivalent of Washington's chief of staff. Yet the impetuous young man later became unhappy serving on Washington's staff and yearned to command his own troops in battle, which he knew would further his career. It took him four more years to regain a field command to participate in the decisive battle of Yorktown.

With a marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of a Hudson River patroon, General Philip Schuyler, Hamilton rose to the top ranks of the American aristocracy. His career took off: Returning to King's College to race through law school, Hamilton soon attended the Confederation Congress in Philadelphia and witnessed the weaknesses of a less unified nation. Soon he was working with James Madison to persuade Americans to endorse a new Constitution, based on the proposition that America would be a representative democracy, not one at the mercy of recalls, referendums and plebiscites. The collection of articles that Hamilton, Madison and John Jay wrote in support of the Constitution, later published as The Federalist Papers , remains one of the great works of political thinking.

Hamilton was indefatigable: At 34, he became Secretary of the Treasury in Washington's administration. As Mr. Chernow points out, "Hamilton planned … to transform America into a powerful, modern nation-state-a central bank, a funded debt, a mint, a customs service, manufacturing subsidies." His vision of America as a great financial and industrial state became the young republic's future.

What Hamilton wanted, above all, was to create a stable nation that would balance the need for order with that of freedom. Mr. Chernow concludes that his central flaw lay "in thinking that the rich would always have a broader sense of public duty and would somehow be devoid of self-interest, instead of being captives to an even larger set of interests."

Hamilton's effectiveness owed everything to his President. Washington never lost his faith in the correctness of Hamilton's polices. Hamilton, in turn, needed Washington's wise counsel to curb his excesses. The President was a steady helmsman and kept his combative Treasury Secretary in line. Once Hamilton was no longer in government, any slur upon his honor was met with a violent verbal or written response, and these outbursts damaged his reputation. His attack on John Adams as President was so vituperative that it eliminated him from running for the Presidency.

The other major error that Hamilton committed was to write a lengthy essay on his liaison with Maria Reynolds, a married woman who enticed Hamilton into an affair and then conspired with her spouse to blackmail her lover. James Monroe, no friend of Hamilton's, made the scandal public. In response, Hamilton felt compelled to describe the affair and the blackmail in detail, lest anyone think he had provided Maria's husband with money to secretly enrich himself through improper speculation in government securities. Hamilton could admit to being an adulterer, but never was he a crook. The scandal, however, forever sullied his name.

Although Hamilton worked to make Jefferson President over Aaron Burr, he had little use for either Jefferson or Burr, a lawyer and intriguer whom Hamilton had known since he first arrived in America. Burr, serving as Vice President under Jefferson, never forgave Hamilton. When Burr accused Hamilton of personally insulting him by calling him "despicable," Hamilton, who maintained that he only criticized Burr for his political views, refused to apologize-which led to their fateful duel.

On July 11, 1804, on a ledge overlooking the Hudson River in Weehawken, N.J., Burr mortally wounded Hamilton, who had deliberately fired in the air in order to avoid killing his antagonist. Never has there been an outpouring of grief to equal the mourning for this quintessential New Yorker: For 30 days, the city's residents wore black armbands. "This scene was enough to melt a monument of marble," said the New-York Evening Post (a newspaper Hamilton had founded).

The extraordinary and improbable career of Alexander Hamilton had come to an end, and here we have another fitting tribute to it: Ron Chernow's massively researched and beautifully written biography.

James Chace is a professor of government at Bard College. His new book, 1912: The Election That Changed the Country (Simon and Schuster), has just been published.

How could this pious man, who invented modern institutional philanthropy and lived according to the strictest rules of church attendance, abstinence, hard work and charitable giving, at the same time have conducted his business affairs with utter ruthlessness? Ron Chernow's fascinating biography explores all three sides of John D. Rockefeller Sr.'s life–personal, business, philanthropic–and remains puzzled by this inconsistency. All the way through the book, he chews at the problem. I offer a lesson of history: Fanatic piety may condone evil means.

As a boy, Rockefeller was taught in a one-room country schoolhouse. At 16, he found a job as bookkeeper with a firm of merchants. He applied unceasing energy to his affairs. "Work enchanted him, work liberated him, work supplied him with a new identity," Mr. Chernow writes. One day, Rockefeller said to an older businessman, "I am bound to be rich–bound to be rich– bound to be rich! "

From the first, he gave generously to charity, even when he had very little money himself. At 20, he gave away more than 10 percent of his income, including a gift to a black man in Cincinnati to buy his wife out of slavery. When he joined the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church in Cleveland, he helped sweep out the halls, usher worshipers to their seats and wash the windows. He attended Friday-evening prayer meetings and two services on Sunday. He abhorred drink, dancing, cards and theater.

John D.'s father, William A. ("Big Bill" or "Devil Bill") Rockefeller, was a flimflam artist who wandered widely, selling cancer cures and other nostrums from a cart. He offered women berries resembling pills, warning them that abortion might result if they were pregnant, which stimulated sales. In due course, Big Bill married devout,. abstentious Eliza Davison and moved her in with his housekeeper-mistress, the beauteous Nancy Brown. The two women started having children in alternation. John D. was born on July 8, 1839, in a bedroom measuring 8-by-10 feet. Big Bill soon began living a double life as "Doc" William Levingston. Under that handle, he married a sweet 17-year-old girl, Margaret Allen, and thereafter wandered irregularly from one family to another.

In his latter years, John D. disavowed his father completely. So perhaps his stern rigor was in reaction to his father's wicked ways. One can sum up the business side of Rockefeller's career by observing that in the early 1880's, the Standard Oil Company refined and transported 85 percent of America's oil, used as kerosene for illumination, not only for America and Europe, but also for China, Japan and India. In the next decade, Standard Oil entered oil production, attaining a third of U.S. output. How was this possible? Mr. Chernow explains in great detail. Rockefeller was a business genius, although his methods were more than rapacious. Starting in 1879, "Rockefeller began a 30-year career as a fugitive from justice"–i.e. process-servers and Congressional summonses.

Mr. Chernow has examined 20,000 pages of letters to Rockefeller from his associates. They were much less discreet than John D. himself, who was careful not to put things to paper that might be used later in court. As a result, transactions can be documented that once were only suspected. Mr. Chernow says that "he and Standard Oil entered willingly into a staggering amount of corruption," and that "his correspondence implicates him directly in this skullduggery." Here, for example, is U.S. Senator John Newlon Camden writing to Rockefeller's associate, Henry Morrison Flagler: "Politics is dearer than it used to be–and my understood connection with the Standard Oil Co. don't tend to cheapen it –as we are all supposed to have bushels." He asked for "$10,000 in some turn–stocks or oil." On another occasion, he wrote, "I have arranged to kill the two bills in Md. legislature at comparatively small expense."

Another Rockefeller business tactic was extorting rebates from the railroads that carried his oil, to the amazing point of getting kickbacks on oil shipped by other producers! This, of course, made it inordinately difficult for them to compete. For long the rebates and kickbacks were hidden, although widely suspected. Finally, it all emerged in court and in legislative reports. A New York State Assembly hearing revealed that Rockefeller had extracted 6,000 secret contracts from the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad and similar ones from the New-York and Erie Railroad. In 1907, Standard Oil was fined about half a billion in today's dollars. A series of extremely hostile exposés inflamed the public. Rockefeller received a blizzard of death threats, and Teddy Roosevelt took an ax to the enterprise.

On the good side, John D. built large enough refineries to make much cheaper kerosene; during Standard's reign the price dropped substantially. The oil refining and shipping business had been composed of inefficient units, which Rockefeller gobbled up, sometimes by ruining them, thus bringing order to the industry.

By his 50's, Rockefeller had become so enormously wealthy that more money meant nothing to him. In today's money, his dividends reached about a billion tax-free dollars a year. To reach that figure after tax would now require capital of perhaps $40 billion. Since he was also able to pass on what he wanted to his offspring without estate tax, in effective terms his capital would be double that, so he was vastly richer than any American of our time. He began to give away huge sums, following these donations with the same minute attention that he had given to the business. He was inundated by requests. After the announcement of one large educational gift, he received 15,000 letters in a week and 50,000 by the end of the month!

Eventually, he concluded that he could only cope by developing a system of wholesale philanthropy. One can thus say that he developed the whole concept of modern institutional giving. Among his most noteworthy large munificences were the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, which later became Rockefeller University, boasting numerous Nobel laureates on its faculty. Another was the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, which helped root out hookworm in the Southern states. Perhaps the most important was his early support of the University of Chicago. His philanthropic streak stayed in the genes. Indeed, the Rockefellers have enjoyed an almost unique success among American plutocratic families in maintaining their philanthropic attitude from generation to generation.

Perhaps the only record to compare with Rockefeller's in public philanthropy is that of Andrew Carnegie, who put up libraries and other institutions all over America. Rockefeller, who often gave anonymously, considered Carnegie a bit showy for displaying his name so widely. On the other hand, Carnegie's famous dictum, "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," certainly did not apply to Rockefeller, whose gifts to his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who became one of the world's first full-time professional philanthropists, were themselves enormous. Like his father, the younger Rockefeller spent much of his life avoiding mendicants, journalists and process-servers.

The elder Rockefeller, fixated on reaching 100, never drank or smoked. He decided that consuming celery eased the nerves, ate an orange peel before breakfast, believed in a tablespoon of olive oil daily, and was devoted to osteopathy and massage. He waited for his food to cool and then chewed each bite, including liquids, 10 times. He would still be eating half an hour after his guests had finished, and then spent an extra hour at table for digesting. Unfortunately, his hair started falling out when he was 47 and had altogether vanished five years later. This gave him a sinister, mummified look, the image that his contemporaries had of him.

In later years, he followed an invariable routine: Awake at 6 A.M. Newspapers for an hour. Wander through the house and garden between 7 and 8, handing out small sums to retainers he encountered. Then breakfast, followed by numerica, a number game. From 9:15 to 10:15, correspondence, largely begging letters–up to 2,000 a week. Thereafter, golf until 12 P.M. From 12:15 to 1, bathe and rest. Lunch and numerica from 1 to 2:30. Thereafter half an hour on a sofa, listening to letters. From 3:15 to 5:15, a drive. Rest from 5:30 to 6:30. Dinner 7 to 9, followed by more numerica. From 9 to 10, listen to music and talk to guests. At 10:30, bed. He followed this cycle almost to the minute. He almost achieved his century, finally, weighing less than 90 pounds, succumbing in 1934 at 95, against the then odds of 1 in 100,000.

What a story! Mr. Chernow, as we have come to expect, has given us an outstanding business biography.