The Titan.

DREISER, Theodore.

$3,500.00

Item Number: 56090

New York: John Lane Company, 1914.

First edition of the second book in the author’s acclaimed Trilogy of Desire. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, “For George T. Keating my most American book Theodore Dreiser N.Y. City 1919.” The recipient George Keating was a well-known book collector in the early twentieth century, who amassed a large Joseph Conrad collection. In near fine condition with a touch of rubbing and offsetting to the endpapers. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell case.

"Dreiser "relied on his own energetic research into the life of his model, the street-railway magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes. [Through] the fictional Frank Cowperwood The Titan details Cowperwood-Yerkes’s stock and street-railway manipulations in Chicago and his long series of sexual conquests. Harper’s, after having printed and advertised the novel, backed out of publishing it, and Dreiser had to find another publisher" (DAB 3, 236).