T
P
R
E F A
C
E
An
Original
Biography
The
Province
of
the
Work
he dark syrup that Asa Griggs Candler carried from an Atlanta drugstore into the
households of the world has become, in the century since his death, a kind of univer-
sal idiom — a measure of the ordinary, of thirst, of pleasure itself. This book is about the
man behind the glass.
Asa Griggs Candler was born in the red clay of Georgia in the winter of 1851, learned the
druggist's trade in a ruined Atlanta, and converted a physician's patent tonic into the first
truly national American beverage company. He was a salesman of genius, a litigant of tire-
less energy, a banker, a mayor, and — above all — a Methodist steward who believed that
wealth was a trust to be spent for the city of God and the city of Atlanta in equal measure.
The pages that follow tell his life in twelve chapters and close with a chronological time-
line, a list of his principal achievements, an account of the honors and memorials that bear
his name, a note on his family, and a guide to sources. The volume is written entirely anew
from public historical materials. In its narrative form it aspires to the standard of the great
modern American biographies, above all David W. Blight's critical biography Frederick
Douglass: Prophet of Freedom — a book whose example has shaped the way this life is told,
though no word of it is borrowed here.
Candler once said that every successful man is either an example or a warning. He was, in
the truest sense, an example — of what patient commerce, honest product, and relentless
promotion could make of a man, and of what one man's conviction could make of a
company.
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