The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

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and impressive portrayal of an unhappy sex relation that I am aware of in

any literature.”3 There is no evidence that Anna assisted him with The Fi-

nancier, although she may have come in on the tail end of the writing— or

editing—process. She definitely helped him with The Titan as she and

Dreiser lived together oª and on from the time of his return from Europe

until he went to Chicago for two months in early 1913.4

By the spring of 1912, Harper’s had sold almost thirteen thousand copies

of Jennie Gerhardt, along with over a thousand copies of their reissued Sis-

ter Carrie. The sales were a little disappointing to Dreiser and may have

been more so to his publishers. Harper’s, fearing that publishing three books

under one title (“The Financier”) was a potential marketing nightmare, de-

cided to give each volume its own name and not to formally advertise the

series as a trilogy. There was also the challenge of the first volume’s exces-

sive length. At the end of the summer, Dreiser asked for Mencken’s liter-

ary judgment, describing himself as “just crawling out from under 250 gal-

leys of the Financier.” Because he ultimately came to the conclusion that

Dreiser’s main gift was the piling up of detail to achieve verisimilitude,

Mencken suggested relatively slight cuts. The book, as published on Octo-

ber 24, 1912, ran to 780 pages filled with hugely long paragraphs.5

Mencken was mistaken to exonerate Dreiser of having “laid on too much

detail,” meaning irrelevant detail. It was more than a minor blemish “on a

magnificent piece of work”—something that Dreiser later realized and that

later yet led him to produce a shorter revised edition. As we shall see,

Mencken would make a number of mistakes in judging Dreiser’s art. Here

he insisted that Dreiser had made Cowperwood as real as one could hope

to make the subject of an actual biography, which The Financier and its se-

quels approach in their faithfulness to the public record of Yerkes’s life. This

was true enough—also the assertion that he had produced the best novel

of business and politics ever written. But it was uncharacteristically romantic

of Mencken to conclude that after almost eight hundred pages the “irrele-

vant details” become “in a dim and vasty way, relevant. As you laboriously

set the stage, the proscenium arch disappears, the painted trees become real

trees, the actors turn into authentic men and women.”6

Carl Shapiro later described The Financier as “a planned work of art,”

but this observation also suggests what is wrong or lacking in the book to

which Dreiser devoted more preparation than he had any of his earlier

books.7 He had become a prodigious researcher to write it, but in doing

the actual writing, he felt himself more or less limited to the biographical

and historical grid of his real financier’s life. In the earlier, more family-

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based novels, there was less will and more whim in the actions of his char-

acters. There Dreiser was able to summon the great powers of his imagi-

nation instead of restricting himself to the actual record. Dreiser never knew,

for example, what exactly happened to Hopkins as he led Hurstwood to

his slow, humiliating death. And Jennie was not just Mame but a character

based on a combination of Mame, whose illegitimate child was stillborn,

and Sylvia, whose unwanted son Carl survived. Moreover, in devoting him-

self to a figure like the wealthy Yerkes, Dreiser had seemingly abandoned

his most enduring topic—that of the not-so-divine average American whose

poverty sated the voracious appetite of big business in the age of the Robber

Barons. Not only is Cowperwood not a victim of a society (though he is,

ironically and ultimately, a victim of his own genius at making money), he

doesn’t even start out poor. Neither had Yerkes.

–

Admirers of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy find it odd that Dreiser

should have devoted so much time and eªort to this Tamburlaine of Amer-

ican business. The theory that Dreiser identified with both the weak and

the strong as pawns in the struggle for the survival of the fittest doesn’t quite

explain his attraction to Yerkes and the subject of the American business-

man. The answer lies first in his poverty while growing up and second in

the dramatic contrasts he witnessed as a young adult between the rich and

poor in America. He had worked in Chicago in the middle 1880s as a news-

paper vender with his brother Ed when Yerkes was at the apex of his finan-

cial power in that city. The future novelist had returned to Chicago at the

end of the decade when the arrogant industrialist was embroiled in the city’s

streetcar strike of 1888. As a reporter in Pittsburgh in 1894, he had witnessed

the systematic manipulation of impoverished immigrants by the Carnegie

Steel Company, and it was here that he had first become fully aware of “the

stark implication of the domination of money in a democracy.”8 Later, in

1897, he had interviewed for Success such parvenu dynasts of American busi-

ness as Philip D. Armour and Marshall Field (models for two of Cowper-

wood’s antagonists in The Titan). Here, too, were possibilities for the nov-

elist following the economic depression of the 1890s—if he could just lift

its public relations curtain enough to reveal the heart and soul of Amer-

ican big business.

Sometime in the late nineties, Dreiser had written a meditation entitled

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“The Supremacy of the Modern Business Man.” He notes in this unpub-

lished essay the history of the aristocratic prejudice against trade in Europe,

but in democratic America it had flourished because of the absence of

“hereditary honors.” He pronounced this new American as the “master of

a hundred millions and heir to nothing.” He had become the new aristo-

crat in capitalistic America who commands “more men in his industrial army

than once the petty German kings had under their banners.” Yet this heroic

image is potentially compromised by the fact that the modern business-

man, unlike those in the professions, has as his primary goal to make money.

It is a danger, Dreiser writes, that can make the businessman “the most sor-

did of all men.”9

Until the turn of the century, these economic buccaneers could count

on the newspapers—as Dreiser discovered in Pittsburgh and expressed in

The Financier—for protection. But the subsequent climate for reform fol-

lowing the economic depression of the 1890s spawned the muckraking

eªorts of David Graham Phillips, Lincoln Steªens, Ida Tarbell, and Upton

Sinclair, among others. Phillips, who was assassinated for one of his exposés

in 1911, depicted the typical financier as a cold-blooded opportunist in such

thinly plotted novels as The Master Rogue (1903). Steªens’s The Shame of

the Cities (1904) unmasked illegal alliances between business and city gov-

ernments. Tarbell excoriated John D. Rockefeller, Sr., in scathing journal-

istic indictments and in her History of the Standard Oil Company in 1904.

Sinclair found the same success in exposing the Chicago meat-packing in-

dustry’s exploitation of the immigrant in The Jungle (1906). Robert Her-

rick’s preachy realism rehearsed the ruthlessness of the Chicago financier

in The Memories of an American Citizen (1905). Meanwhile, the final work

of Dreiser’s former editor and champion of Sister Carrie, Frank Norris, fo-

cused (albeit sentimentally and romantically) on the same dangers of

greedy business practices in a democracy in The Octopus (1901) and The Pit

(1903), the first two volumes of his planned trilogy of how the world’s food

supply was manipulated at all stages of its production, sale, and distribu-

tion. Dreiser, as we know, had not read McTeague before he wrote Sister

Carrie, but one wonders how aware he was later of Norris’s attack on big

business as he came upon the idea of Cowperwood.

Gone forever in American literature was the romantic portrait of the

bungling but honest businessman in Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham or

the rich man of conscience in James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The “realism”

in which an individual suªers defeat with his dignity yet intact was now

considered unrealistic. Such representations had been more accurate in an

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earlier era, before the Civil War, when the merchant operated largely with

his own capital instead of heavily mortgaged assets whose endangerment

weakened his ethical resolve. His profit margin had been narrow and the

inventory turnover slow, but with the expansion of banking practices as