Project Gutenberg's Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, by Andrew Carnegie

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Title: Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

Author: Andrew Carnegie

Editor: John C. Van Dyke

Release Date: March 13, 2006 [EBook #17976]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY

OF

ANDREW CARNEGIE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

[Illustration: [signature] Andrew Carnegie]

London
CONSTABLE & CO. LIMITED
1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY LOUISE WHITFIELD CARNEGIE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFACE

After retiring from active business my husband yielded to the earnest
solicitations of friends, both here and in Great Britain, and began to
jot down from time to time recollections of his early days. He soon
found, however, that instead of the leisure he expected, his life was
more occupied with affairs than ever before, and the writing of these
memoirs was reserved for his play-time in Scotland. For a few weeks
each summer we retired to our little bungalow on the moors at
Aultnagar to enjoy the simple life, and it was there that Mr. Carnegie
did most of his writing. He delighted in going back to those early
times, and as he wrote he lived them all over again. He was thus
engaged in July, 1914, when the war clouds began to gather, and when
the fateful news of the 4th of August reached us, we immediately left
our retreat in the hills and returned to Skibo to be more in touch
with the situation.

These memoirs ended at that time. Henceforth he was never able to
interest himself in private affairs. Many times he made the attempt to
continue writing, but found it useless. Until then he had lived the
life of a man in middle life--and a young one at that--golfing,
fishing, swimming each day, sometimes doing all three in one day.
Optimist as he always was and tried to be, even in the face of the
failure of his hopes, the world disaster was too much. His heart was
broken. A severe attack of influenza followed by two serious attacks
of pneumonia precipitated old