The Financier

Frank Cowperwood learns young that the world belongs to those bold enough to take it. Theodore Dreiser modeled his ruthless hero on the real streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes, tracing Cowperwood’s climb through the banks and brokerages of nineteenth-century Philadelphia. A gift for reading markets carries him from a boyhood soap deal to real power, until the Great Chicago Fire panics the exchanges and exposes his tangled use of city funds. The first book in Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire, it studies money, appetite, and the thin line between genius and fraud without flinching from either. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.