The Financier

Philadelphia and the making of a financier. Dreiser builds Frank Cowperwood's rise and ruin out of the real ledgers of the city: the banks and brokerages of Third Street, the trading floor of the exchange, the municipal offices in Independence Hall he corrupts, and the great gray penitentiary on Fairmount where he is jailed. It brings Philadelphia into the atlas.

Frank Cowperwood

Third Street, the banking district

Third Street, Philadelphia · 6% through the novel

In the first place, the firm of Tighe & Co., unlike that of Waterman & Co., was located in a handsome green-gray stone building at 66 South Third Street, in what was then, and for a number of years afterward, the heart of the financial district. Great institutions of national and international import and repute were near at hand—Drexel & Co., Edward Clark & Co., the Third National Bank, the First National Bank, the Stock Exchange, and similar institutions.

Third Street is where Cowperwood learns his trade and later runs his own brokerage. Dreiser names the real banks that clustered along it—Drexel, the Third and First National—the block that was, as he says, the heart of the financial district and the ground on which the whole novel is built.

explicit Named directly in the text.

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