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By LEONARD CASSUTO
Updated May 4, 2012 7:19 p.m. ET
We remember Theodore Dreiser mainly for his deeply felt tales of have-nots who yearn for much more than the world gives them. In "An American Tragedy," his 1925 masterpiece, a young man's longing for money and social standing leads him to the electric chair. But Mr. Dreiser also wrote admiringly of the wealthy, and this year marks the 100th anniversary of "The Financier," his sweeping and minutely observed story of an enormously successful capitalist.
"The Financier" centers on Frank Algernon Cowperwood, whom the author repeatedly describes as possessing "force." Cowperwood proves himself both skilled and resilient in the financial marketplace. He also keeps a cool head when he's discovered sleeping with his business partner's daughter. Mr. Dreiser so insistently interleaves stock-market intrigue with sex, in fact, that one critic described Cowperwood's story as a club sandwich of "slices of business alternating with erotic episodes."But Cowperwood is no Gordon Gekko. He's suave, not rapacious. And unlike Gekko, who celebrates greed, Cowperwood asserts simply, "I satisfy myself."
Mr. Dreiser drew Cowperwood from life—specifically, the life of Charles Tyson Yerkes, one of the more freewheeling Gilded Age robber barons. Mr. Yerkes made his fortune in municipal rapid transit, but before he started buying up cable-car companies he was a stock and bond broker and speculator.
Mr. Dreiser's detailed account of these machinations, and of the financier's imprisonment, are drawn faithfully from the historical record. But the novelist imagines a scene when the young lover of the adulterous Cowperwood comes to visit him in the penitentiary and the chastened financier weeps in her arms.
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From this low point, Mr. Dreiser's hero soon regains his financial and emotional dominance. Pardoned after 13 months, he re-enters the financial fray on a smaller scale. He quickly becomes rich again when he leverages a stake of $75,000 into more than $1 million over a few days. Acting aggressively in a stricken market, he shorts the stocks of companies related to the firm of Jay Cooke, whose spectacular failure to complete a transcontinental railroad led to what became known as the Panic of 1873. Here again, Mr. Dreiser barely fictionalizes the real-life maneuvers of Mr. Yerkes. Mr. Dreiser follows Cowperwood's further adventures in the Windy City in "The Titan" (1914), the second volume of what would eventually become his "Trilogy of Desire."
Desire was Mr. Dreiser's lifelong subject. His fascination with what people want—and what keeps them wanting, and how their social situations shape what they want—forms the through-line that connects all of his books. Cowperwood gets just about everything he wants, but it is Mr. Dreiser's constant probing of the intertwined needs for money, art, glory, sex and so much else that makes "The Financier" the greatest of all American business novels.
underwater drama. The boy runs home to tell his parents about what he's seen, but they show no concern. "What makes you take interest in such things?" asks his mother, while his father reacts "indifferently."
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