Remember the End is the second novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by the American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 writer Agnes Sligh Turnbull

Agnes Sligh Turnbull

Agnes Sligh Turnbull was a bestselling American writer, most noted for her works of historical fiction based in her native Western Pennsylvania.-Biography:...

 (1888-1982) and it is set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...

 from the 1890s to World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

.

The protagonist Alex MacTay is a Scotsman who is called to be a poet, but instead emigrates to America. On a farm in Western Pennsylvania

Western Pennsylvania

Western Pennsylvania consists of the western third of the state of Pennsylvania in the United States. Pittsburgh is the largest city in the region, with a metropolitan area population of about 2.4 million people, and serves as its economic and cultural center. Erie, Altoona, and Johnstown are its...

 he forms a partnership in a coal mine, marries the farmer's daughter, and suppresses his aesthetic interests. By age 34 he owns two coal mines and has made his first million, but at the cost of deeply wounding his wife and alienating his only son. Sympathetically portrayed, he typifies the strengths and weaknesses of the great tycoons of the period, such as his own model, Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist, businessman, and entrepreneur who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century...

. During the 1907 depression he gets control of a steel mill, but then things go sour for MacTay.