Covering the entire 138-year history of the Met, Rogues' Gallery focuses on the most colorful characters in the museum's checkered past, opening in the office of the just-retired director Guy Philippe Henri Lannes de Montebello, the longest-serving leader in the museum's history, before flashing back to tell the larger story through commanding figures like Luigi Palma di Cesnola, a Civil War hero and epic phony, the museum's first director; J. Pierpont Morgan, the greatest capitalist and art collector of his day, who turned the museum from the plaything of a handful of rich amateurs into a professional operation; John D. Rockefeller Jr., who never served the Met in any official capacity, but became its greatest benefactor and behind-the-scenes puppeteer; the controversial Thomas P.F. (Publicity Forever) Hoving, whose ten-year term as the museum's director revolutionized museums around the world but left the Met reeling; and Jane Engelhard and Annette de la Renta, a mother-daughter trustee tag-team whose stories will simply astonish you.

About Rogues' Gallery
A fascinating behind-the-scenes study of America's rich and what is perhaps their greatest creation, Rogues' Gallery gives its readers an unprecedented tour of the inner sanctum of one of the most famous museums in the world. With over five million visitors per year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a repository for more than two million art objects created over the course of five thousand years. Covering over two-million-square feet, occupying thirteen acres of New York's Central Park, and encompassing power and fire stations, an infirmary, and an armory with a forge, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest museum in the Western Hemisphere, and its glitzy history—its art, its acquisition process, its glittering, if agenda-driven, array of supporters—is sexy, fascinating, and very, very enticing.

The book profiles eccentric characters such as Robert Lehman, the retiring head of Lehman Brothers, who insisted the museum build a monument to his ego, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, whose New York Times went from being the museum's biggest detractor to its most faithful supporter. The curators are just as fascinating, including James Rorimer, the shy medievalist who created the Cloisters; Greek and Roman curator Dietrich Von Bothmer, a refugee from Nazi Germany with a Bronze Star for heroism in WWII, whose most important acquisitions turned out to be looted, and John Pope-Hennessey, the brilliant paintings expert known as The Pope. And of course there is a supporting cast of collectors, donors, string-pullers and fundraisers: Charles Engelhard, the model for the James Bond villain Auric Goldfinger; Irwin Untermyer, whose obsession with collecting drove his wife and children to suicide; Brooke Astor, Henry Kravis, Henry Kissinger, and even Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

About the participants:
Michael Gross is currently a contributing editor at Travel & Leisure. He has previously held positions at The New York Times, New York Magazine, Radar, George, and Esquire. His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Interview, Details, Elle, Architectural Digest, American Photo, Town & Country, Cosmopolitan, and he has also written for the Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. He has profiled subjects from John F. Kennedy, Jr. to Greta Garbo, and he has written on subjects as diverse as urban politics, divorce, plastic surgery, and high society. He is the author of The New York Times best-selling Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (1995), which was published in eight countries; My Generation (2000), a biography of the Baby Boom generation, Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren (2003), and 740 Park (2005). He lives in New York City. Visit: www.mgross.com.

Michael M. Thomas is the bestselling author of eight novels, including The Ropespinner Conspiracy, Hard Money, Hanover Place, Baker's Dozen, and Love & Money. Before becoming a full-time writer, Thomas was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.