The Representation of the Businessman in the Modern American Novel from William Dean Howells to Thomas Wolfe

Abstract

Abstract The figure of the businessman is a phenomenon peculiar to modern American novel due to the fact that this novel is deeply enmeshed in the businessman’s civilization that produced it. This figure, in fact, has made its most significant appearance in modern American novel in the period between William Dean Howells (1837-1920) and Thomas Wolfe (1900- 1938) as an epitome of the socio-economic transformations that took place in the united states during these years . Although Howells is not a modern novelist in strict chronological sense, his treatment of the figure of the businessman is essentially modern. Like those of twentieth century American novelists his businessmen are essentially personifications of the socio-economic system that begets them. This process of personification culminates in the novels of Thomas Wolfe when the businessman becomes the system itself. The present study, therefore, proposes to trace the development of this personifying process of the ethical values of the American socio-economic system in the figure of the businessman in selected American novelists between Howells and Wolfe, namely, Frank Norris (1870-1902), Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and John Dos Passos (1896-1970). The study falls into five chapters: Chapter one is an introductory chapter that traces the origins and rise of the figure of the businessman in post-Civil War American culture and its reflection in the novels of the late nineteenth-century. Special attention will be devoted to the serious treatment that this character-type received with the rise of realism in American novel. The dynamics and policies of the realistic 2 treatment will be analysed in-depth in Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) which is ,in many ways, the first serious treatment of this character type in American novel. Chapter two analyses the treatment of the businessman figure in American naturalistic novel that flourished in the pre-World War I years. The novels selected for analysis here are Norris’s The Pit (1903) and Dreiser’s “Trilogy of Desire”, notably, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914). Chapter three analyses the treatment of the figure of the businessman in the nineteen twenties with particular reference to those of the “Lost Generation” novelists. The text chosen for analysis here are Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Chapter four analyses the treatment of the figure of the businessman in the novels of the Great Depression, especially those novels dealing with the figure of the businessman from the perspective of the 1929 crash and the subsequent Great Depression. The novels selected for analysis are Dos Passos’s U.S.A trilogy (1930-6) and Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) Chapter five is the conclusion of the study that sums up its views and findings.