Gus Wortham: Portrait of a Leader

Gus S. Wortham was a good businessman. Among other enterprises, he started a highly successful insurance company, American General, and helped to shape the economic institutions of Houston.

Gus Wortham was a civic leader, who worked actively in the Chamber of Commerce to influence the city’s economic climate and who left the city a legacy of cultural institutions, including the Wortham Theater Center.

Gus Wortham was a rancher and land developer. Land: they aren’t making any more of it, he liked to say. So he bought it, developed it, and built a business with it.

In short, he became one of the most influential men in the history of Houston. This is the story of his life, his business, his city. Company records and interviews with all Wortham’s surviving friends and associates combine to make it a thorough account. Urban and business historians alike will find this book a fascinating study, and those who know, or want to know, Houston will find it an enlightening chronicle.