The Financier

Frank Cowperwood is a teenager living in Philadelphia when he comes across a lobster kept in a tank. As the lobster lunges at and devours the other sea creatures helplessly trapped with it, Frank decides that this pitiless example of nature red in tooth and claw is the most effective way of advancing in wealth and human affairs. After making some easy money acting as a middleman for a castile soap distributor, Frank quickly finds himself amassing a fortune in business and investments as the Civil War tears across America. Soon he finds himself willingly embroiled in an embezzlement scheme with the hapless city treasurer-only for it all to violently collapse when the Great Chicago Fire causes a stock market crash. The character of Frank Cowperwood and the events surrounding his life are based on the biography of the real-life streetcar tycoon Charles Yerkes, a man so reviled by his contemporaries that he attempted to rehabilitate his public image by building the Yerkes Observatory, which was to be at the time the world's largest telescope. Frank, a ruthless and calculating man of acquisition, is a classic example of the type of warped and avaricious robber baron that became a popular stock character in fiction of the era, and that figured prominently in other milestone works, like The Forsyte Saga, that are critical of the spiritual rot that unimaginable wealth can engender in a hyper-capitalist society. The first installment in Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire, The Financier is a razor-sharp study of ambition unmoored from conscience, as compelling today as when it first chronicled the rise of America's Gilded Age tycoons. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)