The Frank Cowperwood Saga: Theodore Dreiser's The Financier and The Titan

In discussing Theodore Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood novels it seems common to refer to them as a trilogy (the "Trilogy of Desire") consisting of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1945). However, Theodore Dreiser originally wrote The Financier and The Titan as a single novel that the publisher split into two parts. Moreover, while the close of The Titan does offer a sketch of Dreiser's plans for a third book, he only started the concluding The Stoic much later in the 1930s, and did not live to see it through publication--in a heavily downsized form, to go by what I have read. Given that the first two were completed as a single work and published close together, and that what we have of the third appeared so much later it seems to me worthwhile to take the first two books in the saga and review them together while keeping in mind how they work as individual novels and as one single novel, without reference to the third work (which as of the time of this writing, I have not read).

The reviews of the The Financier and The Titan are now up--along with a third item about how Dreiser and Balzac both treated the figure of the businessman in their tales. (Knowing how much Balzac meant to Dreiser, and being struck by the parallels--and differences--between the writers as I read through the books doing so just seemed natural.)