Andrew Carnegie ... the original spin doctor. "ANDREW CARNEGIE" By David Nasaw The Penguin Press ($35) Related coverage Book review: 'Mellon: An American Life' Authors appearing here

Andrew Carnegie was a master of spin long before the term was coined.

David Nasaw describes what happened after Carnegie and his lieutenants had succeeded in forcing a "sliding" wage scale on employees at the company's Edgar Thomson plant in Braddock. Under the new plan, workers' hourly pay was linked to the price of steel.

Carnegie advised friendly, if math-challenged, reporters that workers at the plant were earning more in August 1888 than they would have under wage rates proposed by their former union, the Knights of Labor.

True as far as it goes, wrote the National Labor Tribune. Unimpressed by Carnegie's accounting, the Pittsburgh-based, pro-union newspaper pointed out that the steel workers' higher earnings resulted from laboring not eight but 12 hours a day under the new scale.

Author of a prize-winning biography of William Randolph Hearst, Nasaw has taken on another larger-than-life character. Called the richest man in the world by banker J.P. Morgan, Carnegie was a dirt-poor immigrant boy from Scotland who made his fortune in Pittsburgh.

"The man who dies ... rich, dies disgraced," he once wrote. Seeking to avoid disgrace, he gave away most of his fortune, leaving museums, concert halls, a university, several research foundations and almost 2,500 libraries as his legacy.

A professor of history at City University of New York, Nasaw is an indefatigable researcher. Among the many new sources he draws on are the private papers of Henry Clay Frick. In his autobiography, Carnegie devoted just one sentence to his dour partner, noting that Frick had a genius for management.

Making use of letters, internal reports and coded telegrams, Nasaw fleshes out the day-to-day dealings between the short-tempered Frick and the imperious Carnegie. The wonder of their relationship was not that they parted ways but that they remained business partners so long.

Frick was one of many people Carnegie badgered with directives and pages of advice. Other epistolary victims included several American presidents. Benjamin Harrison, Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft all welcomed Carnegie's financial support but usually dreaded, and often mocked, his suggestions on politics and international affairs.

Carnegie was a man of his free-wheeling times. As a young executive with the Pennsylvania Railroad, he took opportunities for making sweetheart contracts that would make Enron's Andrew Fastow blush. As a bond salesman in Europe, he peddled dubious securities that lost value, sometimes before he returned to America with the proceeds.

But it was as "king of steel" that he made his mark. While the late 19th century is viewed as the high point of laissez-faire capitalism, Nasaw points out how important Washington connections were in making Pittsburgh the center of the world's steel industry.

In 1870, Congress imposed a $28-per-ton tariff on imported steel. That works out to just a bit more than penny a pound, Carnegie might have argued. But that penny guaranteed decades of protection and high profits for domestic mills. Nasaw quotes Carnegie as saying the tariff was "the single most important event in prompting him to enter the steel business."

Carnegie was not above a bit of skulduggery. Nasaw describes how he, Frick and the wonderfully named Philander C. Knox -- Brownsville native, corporation lawyer, U.S. attorney general, U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and secretary of state -- struggled with fine points of bribing Christopher Magee, Pittsburgh's Republican Party boss.

Magee, the trio soon found, was the worst kind of crooked politician -- one who takes your money but doesn't stay bought.

Carnegie, like Frick, became a millionaire before he was 30. Unlike Frick, he soon began to devote less time to business and more to travel, self-improvement and writing books, magazine articles and speeches.

Hypocrisy abounds in his life and career. Carnegie, on vacation somewhere exotic, would alternate notes to his "pards" back in Pittsburgh on the importance of relaxation with memos questioning every aspect of their management of the steel business.

While determined to do good deeds with his fortune, Carnegie was ruthless in cutting costs, including wages, squeezing every nickel out of his workers via longer shifts and reduced pay.

Waiting until his intimidating mother died, Carnegie was 51 when he married. As Nasaw describes her, Carnegie's young bride, Louise Whitfield, was a candidate for sainthood. Their seven-year courtship and long engagement remained a secret right up to the day of their wedding.

Several months earlier, Carnegie had presented his betrothed with a ring from Tiffany's, "which she hid away and wore only when alone in her room."

Nasaw describes Carnegie's final years as a mix of family joy, philanthropic success and geopolitical tragedy.

He had a loyal, patient wife in Louise and an adored daughter, named Margaret for his mother. While assuring that family and many friends were provided for, he succeeded in giving away the bulk of his fortune.

As a life-long believer that "All is well since all grows better," Carnegie was stunned by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The great cataclysm left him uncharacteristically silent.

"The war practically destroyed him," Louise said in an unpublished interview unearthed by Nasaw. "His zest for mere existence had gone."

Carnegie died Aug. 11, 1919, less than a year after World War I ended and a few months before his partner and rival Frick.

"Andrew Carnegie" is filled with descriptions of people, places and events important to Pittsburgh. Nasaw includes 32 pages of photographs showing Carnegie, his family and partners at work and at play.

But even with its strong local links, the tale sometimes lags. Coming in at 801 pages, the book just may be too long. It also could be that a biography of a man whose life was focused on remorseless execution of business principles lacks the natural drama of books about warriors or statesmen.