From USA Today

Who was Fred Harvey? This delicious biography serves up a very satisfying picture of the headache-plagued Englishman who came to the USA in the 1850s, landed work as a pot scrubber, then, writes Stephen Fried, started a business feeding train passengers in the Wild West along the Santa Fe Railway.

Fried calls Harvey the founding father of the American service industry, writing that Harvey “created the first national chain of restaurants, of hotels, of newsstands and of bookstores — in fact, the first national chain of anything — in America” and “developed the first widely known and respected brand name in America,” years before Coca-Cola.

Harvey’s amazing story is a tale of trailblazing entrepreneurship in trying circumstances, of the “Harvey Girls,” waitresses who were the country’s first major female workforce, and of the cowboys and legends who peppered the Wild West. Fried’s comprehensive book even includes recipes pulled straight from Harvey’s “cookbooks.”

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