Carnegie's Maid

 Marie Benedict wrote wrote The Other Einstein and I enjoyed the story about Albert Einstein's first wife very much. She also wrote Carnegie's Maid and I liked that too. This story is more fictional than the Einstein book because the maid in this story is fictional whereas Einstein's first wife was a world famous physicist. No one knows if Carnegie's maid was from Ireland or how much, if any, influence she had on Andrew Carnegie. Somebody had an influence on Andrew Carnegie to turn him into a philanthropist in his later years. The author has a theory that an Irish immigrant maid named Clara Kelly influenced Andrew as she worked as a lady's maid for his mother. Working at the Carnegie house gave Clara the funds she needed to support her parents and sisters in Galway, Ireland.  Did she give him the idea to put telegraph poles next to the rail lines so damaged lines could be noticed and repaired more quickly? Did she give him the idea that free public libraries were so important that he decided to build them all over the United States, Scotland, and Great Britain? Did she convince him that money isn't what made a person valuable?  All we know is Andrew Carnegie, once the richest man in the nation, gave away nearly all his money to improve education, music, and the prospect of world peace.