The Financier
Encyclopedia
Published in 1912, The Financier, a 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 Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...

, is the first volume of the Trilogy of Desire, which includes The Titan
The Titan
The Titan is a novel written by Theodore Dreiser in 1914. It is Dreiser's sequel to The Financier.-Plot summary:Cowperwood moves to Chicago with his new wife Aileen. He decides to take over the street-railway system. He bankrupts several opponents with the help of John J. McKenty and other...

(1914) and The Stoic
The Stoic
The Stoic is a novel by Theodore Dreiser, first published in 1947. It is the conclusion to A Trilogy of Desire, his series of novels about Frank Cowperwood, a businessman based on the real-life streetcar tycoon Charles Yerkes...

(1947).

Plot summary

In Philadelphia, Frank Cowperwood, whose father is a banker, makes his first money by buying cheap soaps on the market and selling it back with profit to a grocer. Later, he gets a job in Henry Waterman & Company, and leaves it for Tighe & Company. He also marries an affluent widow, in spite of his young age. Over the years, he starts embezzling municipal funds. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire redounds to a stock market crash, prompting him to be bankrupt and exposed. Although he attempts to browbeat his way out of being sentenced to jail by intimidating Mr Stener, politicians from the Republican Party
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...

 use their influence to use him as a scapegoat for their own corrupt practices. Meanwhile, he has an affair with Aileen Butler, a young girl, subsequent to losing faith in his wife. She vows to wait for him after his jail sentence. Her father, Mr Butler dies; she grows apart from her family. Frank divorces his wife. Sometime after being released, he invests in stocks subsequent to the Panic of 1873
Panic of 1873
The Panic of 1873 triggered a severe international economic depression in both Europe and the United States that lasted until 1879, and even longer in some countries. The depression was known as the Great Depression until the 1930s, but is now known as the Long Depression...

, and becomes a millionaire again. He decides to move out of Philadelphia and start a new life in the West.

Allusions to actual history

  • Henry Cowperwood is said to have no preference over abolitionism
    Abolitionism
    Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first...

    . Morever, he is said to favour Nicholas Biddle
    Nicholas Biddle (banker)
    Nicholas Biddle was an American financier who served as the president of the Second Bank of the United States.-Ancestry and early life:...

     and the United States Bank
    Second Bank of the United States
    The Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816, five years after the First Bank of the United States lost its own charter. The Second Bank of the United States was initially headquartered in Carpenters' Hall, Philadelphia, the same as the First Bank, and had branches throughout the...

     over Andrew Jackson
    Andrew Jackson
    Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States . Based in frontier Tennessee, Jackson was a politician and army general who defeated the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend , and the British at the Battle of New Orleans...

    . Other historical elements include John Brown
    John Brown (abolitionist)
    John Brown was an American revolutionary abolitionist, who in the 1850s advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to abolish slavery in the United States. He led the Pottawatomie Massacre during which five men were killed, in 1856 in Bleeding Kansas, and made his name in the...

    , Abraham Lincoln
    Abraham Lincoln
    Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...

    , the First Battle of Bull Run
    First Battle of Bull Run
    First Battle of Bull Run, also known as First Manassas , was fought on July 21, 1861, in Prince William County, Virginia, near the City of Manassas...

    , the Siege of Vicksburg, the Battle of Gettysburg
    Battle of Gettysburg
    The Battle of Gettysburg , was fought July 1–3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The battle with the largest number of casualties in the American Civil War, it is often described as the war's turning point. Union Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade's Army of the Potomac...

    , the Battle of the Wilderness
    Battle of the Wilderness
    The Battle of the Wilderness, fought May 5–7, 1864, was the first battle of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's 1864 Virginia Overland Campaign against Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Both armies suffered heavy casualties, a harbinger of a bloody war of attrition by...

    , and J. Proctor Knott
    J. Proctor Knott
    James Proctor Knott was a U.S. Representative from Kentucky and served as the 29th Governor of Kentucky from 1883 to 1887. Born in Kentucky, he moved to Missouri in 1850 and began his political career there...

    .
  • Frank is said not to be believe in Adam and Eve
    Adam and Eve
    Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...

    .
  • Benjamin Franklin
    Benjamin Franklin
    Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...

    's theory of the electric eel is mentioned.
  • Cyrus West Field
    Cyrus West Field
    Cyrus West Field was an American businessman and financier who, along with other entrepreneurs, created the Atlantic Telegraph Company and laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858.-Life and career:...

    , William H. Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt
    Cornelius Vanderbilt
    Cornelius Vanderbilt , also known by the sobriquet Commodore, was an American entrepreneur who built his wealth in shipping and railroads. He was also the patriarch of the Vanderbilt family and one of the richest Americans in history...

    , Jay Gould
    Jay Gould
    Jason "Jay" Gould was a leading American railroad developer and speculator. He has long been vilified as an archetypal robber baron, whose successes made him the ninth richest American in history. Condé Nast Portfolio ranked Gould as the 8th worst American CEO of all time...

    , Daniel Drew
    Daniel Drew
    -Biography:He was born in Carmel, New York.Drew was poorly educated. His father died when Daniel was fifteen years old. Drew enlisted and drilled, but because he enlisted too late, never fought in the War of 1812. After the war, he started a successful cattle-driving business. In 1823, he married...

    , Charles Crocker
    Charles Crocker
    Charles Crocker was an American railroad executive.-Early years:Crocker was born in Troy, New York, to a modest family and moved to an Indiana farm at age 14. He soon became independent, working on several farms, a sawmill, and at an iron forge. In 1845 he founded a small, independent iron...

    , and Collis P. Huntington
    Collis P. Huntington
    Collis Potter Huntington was one of the Big Four of western railroading who built the Central Pacific Railroad as part of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad...

     are mentioned.
  • Dreiser modeled the main character, Frank Cowperwood, on the tycoon Charles Yerkes
    Charles Yerkes
    Charles Tyson Yerkes was an American financier, born in Philadelphia. He played a major part in developing mass-transit systems in Chicago and London.-Philadelphia:...

    .

Allusions to other works

  • Frank is said to own sculptures by Harriet Hosmer, Hiram Powers
    Hiram Powers
    Hiram Powers was an American neoclassical sculptor.-Biography:The son of a farmer, Powers was born in Woodstock, Vermont, on the July 29, 1805. In 1818 his father moved to Ohio, about six miles from Cincinnati, where the son attended school for about a year, staying meanwhile with his brother, a...

    , Edward Clark Potter
    Edward Clark Potter
    Edward Clark Potter was an American sculptor best known for his equestrian and animal statues. His works include the "Fortitude" lion in front of the New York Public Library.-Early years:...

    , and later Bertel Thorvaldsen
    Bertel Thorvaldsen
    Bertel Thorvaldsen was a Danish-Icelandic sculptor of international fame, who spent most of his life in Italy . Thorvaldsen was born in Copenhagen into a Danish/Icelandic family of humble means, and was accepted to the Royal Academy of Arts when he was eleven years old...

    .
  • Lillian is described as someone from a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
    Dante Gabriel Rossetti
    Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

     or Edward Burne-Jones
    Edward Burne-Jones
    Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...

     in Chapter XII. Later, Frank purchases paintings by William Morris Hunt
    William Morris Hunt
    William Morris Hunt , American painter, was born at Brattleboro, Vermont to Jane Maria Hunt and Hon. Jonathan Hunt, who raised one of the preeminent families in American art...

    , Thomas Sully
    Thomas Sully
    Thomas Sully was an American painter, mostly of portraits.-Early life:Sully was born in Horncastle, Lincolnshire, England, to the actors Matthew and Sarah Sully. In March 1792 the Sullys and their nine children immigrated to Richmond, Virginia, where Thomas’s uncle managed a theater...

    , and William Hart
    William Hart (painter)
    William Hart , was a Scottish-born American landscape and cattle painter, and Hudson River School artist. His younger brother, James McDougal Hart, was also a Hudson River School artist, and the two painted similar subjects...

    . Upon the sale of his house, he is said to own paintings by Gilbert, Eastman Johnson
    Eastman Johnson
    Eastman Johnson was an American painter, and Co-Founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, with his name inscribed at its entrance...

    , Édouard Detaille
    Édouard Detaille
    Jean Baptiste Édouard Detaille , was a French Academic painter and military artist noted for his precision and realistic detail....

    , Mariano Fortuny
    Mariano Fortuny (painter)
    Marià Fortuny i Marsal , known more simply as Marià Fortuny or Mariano Fortuny, was a Catalan painter...

    , George Inness
    George Inness
    George Inness was an American landscape painter; born in Newburgh, New York; died at Bridge of Allan in Scotland. His work was influenced, in turn, by that of the old masters, the Hudson River school, the Barbizon school, and, finally, by the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose spiritualism...

     Gobelin
    Gobelin
    Gobelin was the name of a family of dyers, who in all probability came originally from Reims, and who in the middle of the 15th century established themselves in the Faubourg Saint Marcel, Paris, on the banks of the Bièvre....

     tapestry, sculptures by Antoine-Louis Barye
    Antoine-Louis Barye
    Antoine-Louis Barye was a French sculptor most famous for his work as an animalier, a sculptor of animals.-Biography:Born in Paris, Barye began his career as a goldsmith, like many sculptors of the Romantic Period...

  • Aileen likes to listen to Robert Schumann
    Robert Schumann
    Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....

    , Franz Schubert
    Franz Schubert
    Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...

    , Jacques Offenbach
    Jacques Offenbach
    Jacques Offenbach was a Prussian-born French composer, cellist and impresario. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s–1870s and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss, Jr....

     and Frédéric Chopin
    Frédéric Chopin
    Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....

    .
  • In Chapter XXXVIII, Mrs Calligan's daughter is said to have read Charlotte Bronte
    Charlotte Brontë
    Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards...

    's Jane Eyre
    Jane Eyre
    Jane Eyre is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published in London, England, in 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. with the title Jane Eyre. An Autobiography under the pen name "Currer Bell." The first American edition was released the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York...

    , Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
    Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
    Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton PC , was an English politician, poet, playwright, and novelist. He was immensely popular with the reading public and wrote a stream of bestselling dime-novels which earned him a considerable fortune...

    's Kenelm Chillingly, Ouida
    Ouida
    Ouida was the pseudonym of the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé .-Biography:...

    's Tricotrin, Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
    Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
    Amelia Edith Barr in Ulverston, Lancashire, England, died March 10, 1919) was a British American novelist.-Biography:...

    's A Bow of Orange Ribbon.
  • In the last chapter, William Shakespeare
    William Shakespeare
    William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

    's Macbeth
    Macbeth
    The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...

    is mentioned.
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