Theodore Dreiser

The Titan Theodore Dreiser

The city of Chicago, with whose development the personality of Frank Algernon Cowperwoodwas soon to be definitely linked! To whom may the laurels as laureate of this Florence of the Westyet fall? This singing flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin, this rude, rawTitan, this Burns of a city! By its shimmering lake it lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maunderingyokel with an epic in its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with the grip of Caesar in its mind, thedramatic force of Euripides in its soul. A very bard of a city this, singing of high deeds and highhopes, its heavy brogans buried deep in the mire of circumstance. Take Athens, oh, Greece! Italy, doyou keep Rome! This was the Babylon, the Troy, the Nineveh of a younger day. Here came thegaping West and the hopeful East to see. Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls andromances in their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud. From New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine had come a strange company, earnest, patient, determined, unschooled in even the primer of refinement, hungry for something thesignificance of which, when they had it, they could not even guess, anxious to be called great, determined so to be without ever knowing how. Here came the dreamy gentleman of the South, robbed of his patrimony; the hopeful student of Yale and Harvard and Princeton; the enfranchisedminer of California and the Rockies, his bags of gold and silver in his hands. Here was already thebewildered foreigner, an alien speech confounding him-the Hun, the Pole, the Swede, the German, the Russian-seeking his homely colonies, fearing his neighbor of another race. Here was the negro, the prostitute, the blackleg, the gambler, the romantic adventurer parexcellence. A city with but a handful of the native-born; a city packed to the doors with all the riffraffof a thousand towns. Flaring were the lights of the bagnio; tinkling the banjos, zithers, mandolins ofthe so-called gin-mill; all the dreams and the brutality of the day seemed gathered to rejoice (andrejoice they did) in this new-found wonder of a metropolitan life in the West. The first prominent Chicagoan whom Cowperwood sought out was the president of the LakeCity National Bank, the largest financial organization in the city, with deposits of over fourteenmillion dollars. It was located in Dearborn Street, at Munroe, but a block or two from his hotel."Find out who that man is," ordered Mr. Judah Addison, the president of the bank, on seeing himenter the president's private waiting-r