James Young Phillips was born on Jan. 8, 1915, in Fort Worth. His father was a lawyer for members of the River Crest Country Club's big oil families and the family was quite well off. Phillips's father was a prominent member of a major law firm, the director of a local bank and the president of the prestigious Fort Worth Club. He was well-connected and the family enjoyed a mansion right off one of the greens of the exclusive River Crest Country Club golf course. James and his three brothers led a charmed existence until his father succumbed to pneumonia in the late summer of 1928.

The elder Phillips's affairs were in order, but the 1929 stock market crash wiped out the family's fortune. Practically destitute, James's mother sold what she could from their big house and went to work for the Fort Worth Independent School District. She and her sons were suddenly poor in a stately home located in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the nation.

This turn of events no doubt shaped how James Young Phillips and ?Philip Atlee? would come to view what is referred to in The Inheritors as the ?dollar aristocracy,? but it doesn't diminish the power or the acuity of the perspective. Phillips may have melodramatically envisioned himself a ?Threadbare Galahad? (one of the original working titles for this book), but the pages evidence the virility of a Hemingway, the poetic sense of Fitzgerald and the intellectual vitality of a Steinbeck.