The Titan

Frank Cowperwood, a disgraced robber baron, has just been released from prison. After some canny investments pay off, he decides to head west to Chicago, where he can rebuild his fortune and his good name. He takes his mistress, Aileen, with him, and quickly learns how to use his wealth and machine politics to take over the Chicago streetcar system.

The second entry in Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire, The Titan continues the dramatized story of a real life streetcar tycoon, with the character of Cowperwood standing in for the historical figure of Charles Yerkes. Dreiser uses Yerkes' story to illustrate the magnifying and corrupting influence that money can have on the lustful and the covetous: can society benefit from a powerful man who, yes, does deliver some streetcars, but whose only real interest is sex, money, art, power, and glory? While Cowperwood seems to succeed again and again at amassing wealth and power, he too often finds himself unhappy, while those around him are laid to waste by his unbridled ambition and capital.

The second installment in Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire, The Titan charts a ruthless ascent through money, politics, and desire, confirming Cowperwood as one of American literature's great studies in appetite without limit.

The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)