A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice One of The Christian Science Monitor's 10 best books of June 2025 “Keen, sophisticated and appealing.” ―Cree LeFavour, New York Times Book Review The riveting saga of the Seabrook Family, by one of The New Yorker’ s most acclaimed storytellers. “Having left this material for his writer son, my father must have wanted the story told, even if he couldn’t bear to tell it himself.” So begins the story of a forgotten American dynasty, a farming family from the bean fields of southern New Jersey who became as wealthy and powerful as aristocrats―only to implode in a storm of lies. The patriarch, C. F. Seabrook, was hailed as the “Henry Ford of Agriculture.” His son Jack, a keen businessman, was poised to take over what Life called “the biggest vegetable factory on earth.” But the carefully cultivated facade―glamorous outings by horse-drawn carriage, hidden wine cellars, and movie star girlfriends―hid dark secrets that led to the implosion of the family business. At the heart of the narrative is a multi-generational succession battle. It’s a tale of family secrets and Swiss bank accounts, of half-truths, of hatred and passion―and lots and lots of liquor. The Seabrooks’ colorful legal and moral failings took place amid the trappings of extraordinary privilege. But the story of where that money came from is not so pretty They say behind every great fortune there is a great crime. At Seabrook Farms, the troubling American histories of race, immigration, and exploitation arise like weeds from the soil. Great Migration Black laborers struck against the company for better wages in the 1930s, and Japanese Americans helped found a “global village” on the farm after World War II. Revealing both C. F. and Jack Seabrook’s corruption, The Spinach King undermines the “great man” theory of industrial progress. It also shows how American farms evolved from Jeffersonian smallholdings to gigantic agribusinesses, and what such enormous firms do to the families whose fate is bound up in the land. A compulsively readable story of class and privilege, betrayal and revenge―three decades in the making― The Spinach King explores the author’s complicated family legacy and the dark corners of the American Dream. 30 illustrations "A great American tragedy…with shades of Shakespeare’s King Lear ." ― Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor "Contains a Mylar Miracle-Pack of intrigue, with everything you’d expect from a long-submerged, intergenerational blue-blooded drama." ― Dan Piepenbring, Harper's Magazine "Who knew that a family empire built on frozen vegetables could produce a tale worthy of Faulkner." ― Jim Kelly, Airmail " The Spinach King makes for juicy…reading." ― Roger Lowenstein, Wall Street Journal " The Spinach King ?is a rueful, sure-footed portrait of three generations in pawn to a farm boy’s dream. [John] Seabrook’s confiding prose and thorough sourcing deliver a genuine capitalist tragedy:? Lear ?among the pea pods.… Divide and conquer ?was the Spinach King’s maxim, and his short-lived subjugations prove, yet again, how hard it is to be rich and stay human." ― Anne Matthews, American Scholar "John Seabrook wryly details the rise and fall―and Oedipal struggles―of his family’s farming empire.… This is a tremendous tale." ― John Gapper, Financial Times "His parents met, shipboard, en route to Monte Carlo for Grace Kelly’s wedding. His father relied on a mechanized dry cleaner’s rack to separate his formal day wear from his formal evening wear. His grandfather made his mark as ‘the Henry Ford of Agriculture.’ What happens when a fearless investigative reporter turns his sights on his own storied family? In John Seabrook’s case, the answer is magic." ― Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams "[ The Spinach King ] becomes a tour of the American twentieth century via frozen vegetables―both World Wars, the Depression, labor struggles, the Ku Klux Klan. John Seabrook, the scion who became a writer, finds the perfect measured tone, leavened by irony and belly laughs, for his weird saga." ― William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life "John Seabrook’s patrimony was an American agricultural empire, or at least the story of it. Like all empires, it was built by brute force. Seabrook pulls no punches in detailing his forebears’ unsavory deeds.… This is a deeply personal book that is also a tale of twentieth-century American ingenuity and ambition." ― Russell Shorto, author of Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America and Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob "As sweeping in its scope as a great novel.… [ The Spinach King is] a rich story, literally and figuratively, populated with characters, including Seabrook himself, that will stay with you long after you finish reading." ― Susan Orlean, author of The Li