In American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the “It” Girl, and the Crime of the Century (2008), Paula Uruburu tells the story of millionaires behaving badly, with a mix of glamour, sex, madness, and murder, at the tail end of the Victorian Age.
The story of how actress/model Evelyn Nesbitt’s jealous (and probably insane) husband came to murder her lover (before she was “of age”), famous architect Stanford White, is a fascinating one. Uruburu sets out the theory that this Shakespearean tale pre-sages today’s celebrity-obsessed American culture, and its tough to find fault with it.