The destruction of businesses, fortunes, products, and careers is the price of progress toward a better material life. No one understood this economic principle better than Joseph A. Schumpeter, who made his mark as the prophet of incessant change. Drawing on all of Schumpeter's writings, including many intimate diaries and letters never before used, this biography paints the full portrait of a magnetic figure who aspired to become the world’s greatest economist, lover, and horseman—and admitted to failure only with the horses.