The Financier: A Novel

Frank Cowperwood is twelve years old when he watches a lobster pin down a squid in a Philadelphia aquarium, and something clicks. The predator takes what it wants. In Dreiser's ferocious first novel, that childhood moment becomes the blueprint for a life spent consuming and being consumed. We follow Cowperwood from his middle-class origins through the financial bloodbath of the Civil War era and the panic that follows the Great Chicago Fire. He is brilliant, cold, and relentlessly ambitious, a man who sees people and institutions as fuel for his climb. At his side stands his mistress, championing his every move as he builds an empire of bonds and speculation. Based on the real-life financier C.T. Yerkes, this is a novel that refuses to look away from how wealth is actually made in America: through cunning, corruption, and the will to dominate. The first in Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire, The Financier remains the sharpest portrait of predatory capitalism in American literature.