This study of the contributions entrepreneurs have made to the American economy provides portraits of those men and women whose individual enterprise helped to establish the character of the American businessperson and to carry the economy forward from colonial times.

Enlarged to take into account such dramatic changes in entrepreneurship as the explosive growth of government and the puzzling effects of "stagflation, " the expanded edition includes biographies of Mary Switzer and Marriner Eccles, two "bureaucratic entrepreneurs" whose work represents the two most prominent trends in government economics, and a short essay on the nature of bureaucracy in both government and the private sector.