The Americans — John Jakes

A NATION ADRIFT -- AND THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO GAVE IT HOPE

It was the whip-end of an era -- when innocence died and money lust was enthroned. The new generation of Kents was locked in a feverish race for wealth -- even as Europe's millions poured across the seas, to change the face of our nation and reap its forgotten promise among the pushcarts of Mulberry Street, the hardnosed docks of Boston, the steaming Barbary Coast.

Gideon Kent, his health failing, fears for the future of his lost dynasty. His actress-daughter, Eleanor, learns what it is to love an alien in the land of the free. Con-man Carter drifts cross-country in search of a lazy fortune. It falls to young Will. broken by his mother's madness, to redeem Philip Kent's American dream.