The Titan
A financier arrives in Chicago and begins buying street railways, newspapers and politicians. Dreiser's second novel about Frank Cowperwood is a study of power without apology: the pleasure of the deal, the machinery of corruption, and the way a city can be rearranged by a man who understands its credit.
It is long and sometimes repetitive, and Dreiser's prose is not elegant. But the portrait of a speculator is convincing in a way that more literary novels rarely manage, because Dreiser is interested in the actual mechanics of control rather than in moral judgement.
Public-domain status
First published in 1914. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Theodore Dreiser died in 1945, so this work has been free to republish there since 2016.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 3629 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838
- New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891
- The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875
- Chicago — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
Find a print edition on Amazon · As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Disclosure