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Memoirs

THE SPINACH KING

John Seabrook

The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

The riveting saga of the Seabrooks of New Jersey, 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 multigenerational story of a forgotten American dynasty, a farming family from the bean fields of southern New Jersey that became as wealthy, glamorous, and powerful as Gilded Age aristocrats. The autocratic 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 facadeglamorous outings by horse-drawn carriage, hidden cellars of world-class wine, and movie stars skinny-dipping in the poolhid dark secrets that led to the implosion of the family business. In a compulsively readable story of class and privilege, betrayal and revenge, John Seabrook explores his complicated family legacy and dark corners of the American Dream. John Seabrook has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than three decades. He is the author of The Song Machine and three previous books. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. http://www.johnseabrook.com/

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Book Published 2025-06-03 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

As sweeping in its scope as a great novel, The Spinach King is that rare work of nonfiction that folds meticulous reporting into a stirring story of a prominent American family's rise and fall, pain and redemption. It's a rich story, literally and figuratively, populated with characters, including Seabrook himself, that will stay with you long after you finish reading.

John Seabrook was warned against rooting around the wreckage of his grandfather's business empire. Fortunately for readers, he didn't listen. The Spinach King is a propulsive, intergenerational saga with drama to rival King Lear and enough social-climbing audacity to make a Kardashian blush. In upending his family's founding myth of a glittering fortune built on ingenuity, loyalty and old-fashioned hard work, Seabrook tells a far larger?and truer?story. This is the tale of a patriarch immolating on the flames of his own ambition and the rotten roots of a great American archetype: the self-made man.

As the saying goes, behind every great fortune there lies a great crime. John Seabrook confronts the crimes of his family?political, economic, personal?with unflinching honesty. The Spinach King is an epic American tragedy, a powerful book about status, wealth, corruption, and succession that reveals much about how our ruling class still behaves today.

The Spinach King is an astonishing tale of American ingenuity, exploitation, and betrayal, pried from the burnished bedrock of family myth by one of the best narrative nonfiction writers of our time. With the cool gaze of a reporter and an understated outrage, John Seabrook has disinterred the dark secrets of his celebrated forebears in this immensely entertaining, original, unforgettable book.

The story of the family Seabrook is extraordinary. Raw ambition gets it rolling in the unprepossessing farmlands of New Jersey. It becomes a tour of the American 20th century via frozen vegetables both world wars, the Depression, labor struggles, the Klan. John Seabrook, the scion who became a writer, finds the perfect measured tone, leavened by irony and belly laughs, for his weird saga. He digs up secrets, scandals, and production quotas, and ends by bringing it all uncomfortably close to home.

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, as he unpacks, artfully and frankly, all that comes tumbling, along with the smoking jackets, from that capacious closet.

John Seabrook's mother told him not write this story, and yet here it is, The Spinach King, the unforgettable epic of the Seabrook Farms frozen food empire, with its cabbage and peas, factory towns, indentured labor, patriarchs and restless sons. It's the story of America, the good and bad, the rise and fall, the promise and corruption, opulence, vacation homes, fantastic fortunes and beautiful clothes, gangsters, diesel trucks, strikes and strike breakers, captured in the story of a single family and built on the secrets that were meant to stay in the safe in back of the wine cellar in the basement of the mansion at the bottom of New Jersey. Lucky for us, John Seabrook, like FDR, turns out to be a traitor to his class in the best possible way. And like the Sopranos, it all happened in New Jersey.

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, and along the way gives a lively primer on flash-freezing, boil-in-the-bag spinach, and the marketing of the green salad. This is a deeply personal book that is also a tale of 20th century American ingenuity and ambition.

In The Spinach King, John Seabrook sets out to recount the little-known and fascinating story of the Henry Ford of agriculture?and the revolution in vegetable growing, packaging, processing, and preservation that made boil-in-bag Lima beans the curse of many a 20th-century childhood. Beneath it, however, lies a much more tragic and gripping tale: "Succession" but make it spinach. With cameo appearances from Zsa Zsa Gabor and the Klan, settings from "Deep South" Jersey to Prince Rainier's superyacht, and an unhealthy serving of money, ambition, and betrayal, Seabrook's memoir reveals the emotional trauma behind your frozen veggies.