The Titan

Overview & Synopsis

This 1914 novel is a masterpiece of financial fiction that dramatically and meticulously captures the business practices of the Gilded Age. Here it is presented in a scholarly edition which draws deeply on archival sources. Following the text are informative commentaries, notes, emendations, and color images, all fully indexed. For this volume in the Dreiser Edition, editor Roark Mulligan has gone back to a 1914 proof as copy-text, a version of the novel that, until now, was in a private collection, unknown to the public. The Titan is the second volume in Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire (The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic). Written during an extremely productive period when Dreiser felt financial pressure to produce novels regularly, when he was experimenting with new techniques, and when he was publishing major works yearly, The Titan is a work of the Dreiser’s golden period. Based closely on the life of Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905), The Titan follows Dreiser’s financier (Frank Algernon Cowperwood) from Philadelphia to Chicago, where he builds a transportation empire while battling competitors and romancing women. Dreiser explores the vast cultural and economic forces that transformed American financial practices. The novel’s narration of interacting economic, financial, and social forces, its focus on a powerful and psychologically driven individual, and in particular its examination of the interaction between capitalist enterprise and public good, speak to issues of perennial importance.