This book is the career and life story of the A&P heir and American businessman Huntington Hartford (1911-2008), as told by his daughter Juliet Hartford. Huntington Hartford's grandfather founded the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P supermarket) in 1859 and his two uncles built it into the world's largest retail empire. A&P became a beloved staple of American life and Huntington Hartford was a symbol of it.
Using a wealth of photographs and visual documents including press clippings and advertisements, the book traces Hartford's life from a boy in Newport, Rhode Island, to his years at Harvard where he was known as the world's richest college boy, his time in the US Coastguard during World War II, his Hollywood career producing movies and opening the Huntington Hartford Theatre, to his founding of the oil shale company Tosco and developing Paradise Island in the Bahamas in the 1960s. In Juliet Hartford's words Huntington Hartford was a cultural and popular hero, "always at the forefront and on the cutting edge. He created a hurricane and walked straight through it, and he changed the world."
Growing up with my father was extraordinary. He had a brilliant sense of humor and was a charismatic genius. People hung on his every word. He started a cultural revolution and he represented a Great America. Juliet Hartford
