At her death in 1916, the richest woman in America was worth approximately two and a third billion dollars in today's money. She lived in a forty-dollar-a-month Hoboken tenement, ate cold oatmeal because she would not pay to heat her stove, and wore the same black dress for so many years it had turned green from age. When her son broke his leg as a teenager, she refused to pay a doctor. The leg eventually had to be amputated.

Her name was Hetty Green. Henrietta Howland Robinson, born on the twenty-first of November, 1834, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, into a wealthy Quaker whaling family. At the age of eight she read the financial papers to her grandfather. By thirty she had inherited approximately seven and a half million dollars. She married a banker named Edward Henry Green in 1867 and immediately separated their finances. He lost his fortune. She kept hers. She invested.

She invested in railroad bonds, government bonds, and distressed real estate during financial panics, and she was extraordinarily good at it. She turned the inherited seven and a half million into approximately one hundred million by 1900 and roughly two hundred million by her death in 1916. She did this from a small desk in the basement of the Seaboard National Bank on lower Broadway. She refused to rent her own office. She carried her cold oatmeal to work each morning wrapped in newspaper. She lived in forty-dollar-a-month tenement rooms in Hoboken and Brooklyn to avoid New York State income tax. In October 1907, during the Panic, she personally lent the City of New York one point one million dollars at six per cent interest to keep it solvent.

Her son Edward, called Ned, dislocated his knee in a sledding accident at sixteen in 1885. Hetty took him to a free clinic for the poor in lower Manhattan. They were recognised as wealthy and refused free care. She refused to pay for proper treatment. She tried home remedies for three years. The leg developed gangrene. In 1888 Ned's leg was amputated above the knee by a New York surgeon named Dr Harris Kean. Ned wore a cork prosthesis for the rest of his life. Hetty Green died at eighty-one in 1916 as the richest woman in the United States.

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