1929

1929, Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History, published by Viking in the fall of 2025, is the new book from Andrew Ross Sorkin, the New York Times financial journalist and author, nearly two decades ago, of Too Big to Fail, the account of the 2008 financial crisis that became a publishing sensation and was later adapted into a film. With this new work, Sorkin travels back a century to reconstruct the Wall Street crash of October 1929, and above all the years that preceded it, when reckless speculation, easy credit and blind faith in the stock market's endless growth had turned trading into a mass phenomenon. Drawing on historical archives and partly unpublished documents, the author reconstructs the period stretching from the final years of the Coolidge presidency through the handoff from Hoover to Roosevelt, delivering a sprawling group portrait of bankers, politicians, speculators and small investors swept up by the same forces.

The book stands out for a narrative approach closer to storytelling than academic history, a mode Sorkin had already used successfully in Too Big to Fail, historical figures such as Wall Street bankers, Federal Reserve officials and political leaders of the era are treated as characters in an ensemble drama, with dialogue reconstructed from documentary sources and a narrative pace designed to make the complexity of the financial mechanisms behind the collapse accessible even to non-specialists. Sorkin devotes considerable space to the political and regulatory failures that allowed the speculative bubble to inflate unchecked, indirectly offering a lens through which to view more recent financial crises, from 2008 onward. The book has not been without critics, particularly from free-market circles that have taken issue with passages they consider too favorable toward state intervention in the economy, but the historical reconstruction and quality of the writing have been widely acknowledged even by those who dispute its political framing.

Received as one of the season's most notable nonfiction releases, the book has been called by several outlets essential reading for understanding the distant roots of modern financial crises, and it climbed quickly up US nonfiction bestseller lists, confirming the public's enduring appetite for economic history told with narrative drive.