The Financier, a novel — Theodore Dreiser

The Financier, a novel is the first volume of the Trilogy of Desire, which includes The Titan and The Stoic. Frank Cowperwood makes his first money by buying cheap soaps on the market and selling them to a grocer for profit. Cowperwood marries an affluent widow and over the years, he starts misusing municipal funds with the aid of the City Treasurer. The Great Chicago Fire redounds to a stock market crash, prompting him to be bankrupt and exposed. The Financier follows Cowperwood through trial, his reemergence in the financial world and a move West and a new start. Theodore Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist who the naturalist school and is known for portraying characters whose value lies not in their moral code, but in their persistence against all obstacles, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency.