Ex-Army Captain Sam Walton, at the end of WWII, doggedly pushed a dismal Arkansas five-and-dime and $25,00 family loan via a commonplace business stratagem into the Wal-Mart miracle that one time catapulted him into America's richest man with $9 billion in his pile. Sam's bright idea was to beg wholesalers to cut their profit margin so his store could sell cheaper. They laughed in his face. But he found smart variety store execs and money and, as everyone knows, made it work. This intimate biography details fully his boyhood, college days, romance, and his early business blunders. It crackles with the human side--Sam's love of quail hunting and rather casual flying, on to his physicians' account of his heroic but futile fight against cancer.