Does this make sense to you? Does it help explain her decision to spend so many years in the hospital? What other factors might have contributed to her choice?ģ. Huguette preferred solitude for so much of her life, and then apparently enjoyed the hustle & bustle of the hospital environment. Is it difficult to understand why Huguette chose not to live in any of her beautiful homes for the last 20 years of her life?Ģ.

If reproducing, please credit with the following statement: 2015 Mount Prospect Public Library. The Library is happy to share these original questions for your use. These book discussion questions are highly detailed and will ruin plot points if you have not read the book. Empty Mansions reveals a complete picture of the enigmatic Huguette Clark, heiress to one of the greatest fortunes in American history, a woman who had not been photographed in public since the 1920s. Dedman has collaborated with Huguette’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have had frequent conversations with her, to tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter who is born into an almost royal family of amazing wealth and privilege, yet who secrets herself away from the outside world. At its heart is a reclusive 104-year-old heiress named Huguette Clark.

Empty Mansions is a rich tale of wealth and loss, complete with copper barons, Gilded Age opulence, and backdoor politics. When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed a property listing for a grand estate that had been unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled into one of the most surprising American stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Title: Empty Mansions : The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American FortuneĪuthor: Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, JR.

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