Phoebe Apperson HearstIn Phoebe Apperson Hearst: A Life in Power and Politics, Alexandra M. Nickliss offers the first biography of one of the Gilded Ages most prominent and powerful women. A financial manager, businesswoman, and reformer, Phoebe Apperson Hearst was one of the wealthiest and most influential women of the era and a philanthropist, almost without rival, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hearst was born into a humble middle class family in rural Missouri in 1842;