Abstract
During the late nineteenth century a novel social type, the millionaire manufacturer and financier, came to prominence on the American scene and provided writers with compelling literary subject-matter. The spectacle of the entrepreneurs’ rise to wealth and power attracted William Dean Howells, whose The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) was the first serious fictional study of this type, as well as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. The ideological perspectives and literary preoccupations they brought to their subject were diverse, and realism of treatment was subjugated to the moralistic or tendentious interpretation of ‘the captain of industry’ that they each wished to present.
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Notes
Edwin H. Cady, The Road to Realism: The Early Years 1837–1885 of William Dean Howells (Syracuse: 1956) pp. 21, 34, 92;
quotation taken from ‘Criticism and Fiction’ in William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, edited by Clara and Rudolf Kirk (New York: 1959) p. 42.
Lionel Trilling, ‘Manners, Morals, and the Novel’, collected in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Harmondsworth: 1970) p. 212.
Franklin Walker, Frank Norris: A Biography (New York: 1963) pp. 8, 13–14.
Ibid., p. 276.
Walter Fuller Taylor, The Economic Novel in America (New York: 1973) p. 301.
Walker, op. cit., p. 293.
Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist, Complete Works (Port Washington: 1960) VII, p. 16.
Theodore Dreiser, ‘The American Financier’, in Hey,Rub-A-Dub-Dub (London: 1931) p. 86.
Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, Theodore Dreiser (New York: 1956) pp. 129, 135.
Donald Pizer, The Novels of Theodore Dreiser (Minneapolis: 1976) pp. 156, 162.
Frederick Engels, ‘Letter to August Bebel (1893)’, in Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (Moscow: 1965) p. 429.
Quoted in Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists 1861–1901 (London: 1962) pp. 336, 386.
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© 1983 Michael Spindler
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Spindler, M. (1983). The Rise of the Entrepreneur in the Work of Howells, Norris and Dreiser. In: American Literature and Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06398-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06398-7_4
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