Résumé
Résumé de Le Financier
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
For readers who love novels about money, cities and ambition, and who enjoy a hero they can admire and doubt in the same chapter.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
The Financier is a novel by Theodore Dreiser, published in 1912. It follows Frank Algernon Cowperwood, a banker's son in Philadelphia, as he turns a sharp mind for money into a fortune in the years before and after the American Civil War. Dreiser based his hero on a real traction magnate, Charles Yerkes, and he wrote the book to show how big American money was actually made, not how it was supposed to be made.
The novel is the first part of a trilogy he called the Trilogy of Desire. It is also a portrait of a city. Philadelphia in this book is run by contractors, party bosses and bankers who lend one another public money and call it business. Dreiser gives you prices, loans, bonds and bribes in plain detail, and he sets them beside a love affair, a marriage that fades and a boy's early lesson about how the world feeds on itself.
What will you get from it? A clear view of how a ruthless, gifted man reads people and markets, and how a financial system can reward him and then turn on him. You will meet a boy at a fish market, a city treasurer who cannot say no, an Irish political boss and his daughter, and a panic that tests everyone. We begin where Cowperwood begins, with a tank, a lobster and a squid.
Dans ce résumé
- 1A boy learns that life feeds on lifeFree
- 2He learns money from the inside
- 3A marriage built on sensible grounds
- 4The city treasurer and the borrowed money
- 5Aileen Butler enters his life
- 6Wealth, art and the look of power
- 7The Chicago fire and the panic
- 8What the novel is really about
- 9How Dreiser tells it
Point clé 1 sur 9
A boy learns that life feeds on life
The novel opens in Philadelphia, where Frank Cowperwood is born in 1837 into a respectable family. His father, Henry Worthington Cowperwood, is a bank clerk with steady habits and modest means. The household is orderly and comfortable, and the boy grows up watching how people earn, spend and save. He is quick, watchful and unusually calm for a child.
The key scene comes early. On his way past a fish market, Frank often stops at a tank in a shop window. In it a lobster is kept with a squid, and each day he checks on them. The squid, which seems the stronger, cannot be caught at first, and the lobster, slowly and without hurry, wears the squid down. Over many days the lobster wins and the squid is eaten.
The boy is not shocked by this. He is thoughtful, and he asks himself what it means. If lobsters live on squids and men live on lobsters, then what does that say about people? His answer is that things live on each other, and that the strong take from the weak as a matter of course. Dreiser plants this idea in a child on purpose, and it will run through the whole book.
The scene also shows how Frank thinks. He does not moralize or feel pity as other children might. He watches, draws a conclusion and files it away. Later, when he faces rivals who are older, richer and better connected, this early picture of how the strong win will guide him.
A second small lesson follows the first. Frank sees a boy sell something cleverly, and he sees how a small gain can be made from a small gap in knowledge. Here the future financier is already forming. He is a boy who looks for the arrangement under the surface of things and wants to be on the winning side of it.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Who’s who
- Frank Algernon Cowperwood
- A gifted Philadelphia broker and banker's son, Frank pursues wealth while building connections with businessmen and politicians.
- Henry Worthington Cowperwood
- Frank's careful father works in banking and helps his ambitious son gain access to the financial world.
- Lillian Semple Cowperwood
- Frank's wife is a composed, conventional widow who values domestic comfort and social respectability.
- Aileen Butler
- Edward Butler's spirited young daughter grows restless within her strict household and feels drawn to Frank.
- Edward Butler
- A wealthy Irish contractor and political boss, Edward is Aileen's protective father and an important business connection for Frank.
- George Stener
- Philadelphia's politically appointed city treasurer relies on Frank's financial abilities to profit from the public funds he controls.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 200,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 13 h 20 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 11 other languages
Questions about Le Financier
What is The Financier by Theodore Dreiser about?
It tells of Frank Cowperwood, a gifted Philadelphia broker in the mid nineteenth century, who builds a fortune through city loans and political ties while pursuing an affair with a powerful man's daughter.
Is Frank Cowperwood based on a real person?
Yes. Dreiser modelled him on Charles Yerkes, an American financier who made his money in Philadelphia and later in Chicago street railways. Dreiser changed names and many details, so the novel is fiction.
What is the lobster and squid scene in The Financier?
As a boy, Frank watches a lobster slowly kill a squid in a fish market tank. The scene teaches him that life feeds on life, and it shapes his view of business and people.
Is The Financier hard to read?
The prose is plain. Readers find the story clear and the characters strong.
Is The Financier part of a series?
Yes. It is the first book of Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire, followed by The Titan and The Stoic. All three follow Cowperwood as he moves from Philadelphia to Chicago and beyond.