Sidebar
Main Content
"A Strangely Strong Novel in a Queer Milieu" | 
| |
Rare Book & Manuscript Library University of Pennsylvania | ||
The Financier
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912
In Dreiser's desire to write a novel about an American financier, the real-life career and personality of Charles T. Yerkes served as a rich model. A well-known figure in American life from the mid-1880s until his death in 1905, Yerkes rose to fame and fortune in Chicago with gas and traction interests. The details of his life (which received much press attention in the five or six years following his death) were the stuff of melodrama and included a prison term in Philadelphia, divorce, love affairs, immense expenditures on art, and so forth. Frank Algernon Cowperwood is Dreiser's imaginary Yerkes in a saga that Dreiser envisioned as a trilogy.
Table of Contents
© University of Pennsylvania | Last update: Thursday, 14-Dec-2006 08:23:46 EST
| 215-898-7555
| shawcros@pobox.upenn.edu