Word: bulwarks
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Unless Theodore Dreiser's editors have fooled us again, "The Stoic" will take its place in American literature courses as his last novel. The course reading list will be the proper place for it, since--like Dreiser's other posthumous novel "The Bulwark"-- "The Stoic's" chief importance is historical rather than literary. The jacket blurb to the contrary, "The Stoic" simply does not reach the stature of "The Financier" or "The Titan," its predecessors in "The Trilogy of Desire." In concluding what Parrington called "a colossal study of the American businessman," Dreiser tells those familiar with the earlier volumes...
...fiction indeed. Marked by the vitality and massive documentation typical of Dreiser, this extension of Cowperwood's activities into the London financial world at times hits with undeniable power. Although Dreiser never completed "The Stoic" he did live long enough to polish it far beyond the raggedness of "The Bulwark." This superiority inheres in the book's construction. Cowperwood--his business and his philanderings--occupies the stage at all times; hence there is none of the diffusion of energy that mars the treatment of Solon Barnes and his splintering family in "The Bulwark." Until his death, Cowperwood carries the novel...
Hankering for Meaning. The Stoic closes on the same note of spiritual hankering which pervaded The Bulwark (TIME, March 25, 1946). After Cowperwood's death his mistress travels to India, seeks a religious meaning in life by studying Yoga. But she cannot reconcile spiritual claims with the poverty she sees around her, and is condemned to the old Dreiserian materialist world. In notes for a final chapter, which he did not live to write, Dreiser indicates that the mistress, with the money left her by Cowperwood, realizes his dream of subsidizing a hospital. Seldom has Dreiser allowed himself such...
...argued, was entitled to territory commensurate with her stature as a state; Prussia could govern Silesia better than Austria could; it was Prussia's destiny, and anyway he was only striking first, for it was a defensive war designed to "prevent others [from] seizing" Silesia, and to bulwark Prussia against her enemies. The works of Prussia's enemies, then and in the dreadful Seven Years' War that followed, were represented by Frederick as "a conspiracy"; but if they conspired against him, he had led them into it. As in 1914 and in 1940, Prussia's enemies...
...Bulwark Prospect...