THE MEMOIRS OF THE DEAN OF WALL STREET

The engrossing personal and emotional reminiscences of a master of the investment game, one whose canon remains as influential and useful today as when it was first codified over six decades ago. If Wall Street has a bible, it's Security Analysis, written by Graham and his student David Dodd, a how-to that's stayed in print since its publication in 1934. Though best remembered as the originator of value-investment theory, Graham was a protean figure who made time for the arts, family, women, and a wealth of avocations. While this previously unreleased memoir covers only the first 40-odd years of the author's long (18941976) and productive life, it provides the measure of a man whose name remains a byword in the global financial community. Drifting into the brokerage business after graduating second in his class from Columbia University, he began conducting exhaustive audits of publicly available financial data that gave him an unrivaled eye for upwardly mobile debt and equity securities. Venturing out on his own in 1923, Graham launched the first in a series of mutual-fund- like partnerships that applied his investment principles and earned him fame as well as fortune. The cultured, multilingual Graham hobnobbed with Bernard Baruch, taught at Columbia, did pro bono economic consulting for the US government, and composed very decent poetry and a dreadful play. Married and divorced three times, he sired a half dozen children. The absorbing narrative comes to an abrupt halt in the mid-1930s, but editor Chatman (Rhetoric/Univ. of California, Berkeley), who supplies an informative introduction, has appended pensÇes penned by Graham on the occasions of his 63rd and 80th birthdays. These concise, introspective epilogues round out the self- portrait of a warm if wary individual with a lively, inquiring mind. (8 pages photos, not seen)