Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser.

Author of Sister Carrie, The Financier, The Titan and one of my favorite books, An American Tragedy.

He’s a great Chicago author, he understands our fair city. I’ve just finished reading the Financier which is a historical fiction novel based on the life and times of one Charles Yerkes. Charles Yerkes was the man who waltzed in to Chicago after some very shady dealings in Philadelphia. He took out all sorts of leases on railway lines and finally consolidated them, elevated them and started the “L” When the Chicago City Council ran Yerkes out of town for more shady dealings, he went to London and started the Underground there.

The Financier is about his life in Philly, The Titan continues with his dealings in Chicago and the L and the Worlds Fair and all that juicy stuff I love.

He’s quite a character and the books are awesome. American Tragedy is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. All about the struggle in the 1890’s for class in downtrodden Chicago. It all leads to murder and mayhem, but it’s so much fun getting there.

Here’s one of my favorite descriptions of Chicago from The Titan:

“To whom may the laurels as laureate of this Florence of the West yet fall? This singing flame of a city, this all-America, this poet in chaps and buckskin, this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city! By its shimmering lake it lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering yokel with an epic in its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with the grip of Caesar in its mind, the dramatic force of Euripides in its soul. A very bard of a city, this, singing of high deeds and high hopes, its heavy brogans buried deep in the mire of circumstance. Take Athens, oh Greece! Italy, do you keep Rome! This was the Babylon, the Troy, the Nineveh of a younger day. Here came the gaping West and the hopeful East to see. Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idylls and romances in their minds, builded them an empire, crying glory in the mud”

Ahhh, light summer reading.