In “The Financier” and “The Titan” Dreiser widened the scope of his vision to a large extent. They both display a _tableau de mœurs_ about a central character. These books tax the patience of the reader. They are too long, too clumsy, too detailed, and yet they reveal an unquestionable master. Cowperwood is a magnificent rascal, one whom Balzac would have been proud to capture for his gallery of rogues. It is Vautrin in a Tuxedo and behind a mahogany desk. Cowperwood is a Spencerian animal of authentic pedigree, a superb plesiosaurus, a Dreiserian superman _par excellence_. The reader of this book has not forgotten how his vocation was revealed to him before the tub where the lobster fought the squid. Cowperwood has no conscience. He is ruled by tyrannical instincts. He has no more sense of responsibility than a cyclone. Indeed, he has so little of it that he quickly becomes as monotonous as an automaton performing on the stage under the disguise of a real man. He was born to harm as the shark is born with teeth. From the very first pages of the book until the end, he appears as an indomitable energy, let loose on this planet. He comes from the same zoo as most of the heroes of Jack London. Fate lets him be born in Philadelphia and he mistakes the stock exchange in that city for the wilds of Alaska or the South Seas. He knows of only one law, that of the jungle, and in regard to ethics he is a perfect vacuum, the most completely amoral person in the whole history of the American novel.