From the Way to Wealth to the Gospel of Wealth: The Transformation of the Concept of Success in American Literature from Benjamin Franklin to Theodore Dreiser

This research monograph based on an extensive and original investigation of American literary sources and literary history and it discusses the extraordinary change that occurred in American literature and life based due to the shifting definition and framework of the concept of success from Franklin’s ethically framed view of the citizen as a progressive member of an evolving exciting late colonial-early republican society through the redefinition of success and wealth into merciless individualism, money drenched respectability and amorality following the Civil War an culminating in Dreiser’s great creative works such as The Titian, Jennie Gerhardt, Sister Carrie and The Financier.