Liar's Poker

Michael Lewis wrote Liar's Poker as a 28-year-old fresh out of Salomon Brothers, and he accidentally created the definitive account of 1980s Wall Street excess. The book follows Lewis from Princeton and the London School of Economics into the bond trading floor at Salomon, where he witnessed the invention of mortgage-backed securities — the same instruments that would blow up the global economy twenty years later.

Lewis intended the book as a cautionary tale. Instead, a generation of college seniors read it and decided they wanted to work on Wall Street. That irony tells you everything about the seductive power of Lewis's writing. He is the best narrative nonfiction writer alive, and Liar's Poker is where it started. The portraits of traders like John Gutfreund and Howie Rubin are unforgettable, and the description of the Salomon Brothers training program remains the most vivid account of Wall Street culture ever published.