The Financier

Frank Algernon Cowperwood

Frank Cowperwood learns finance at his father's bank the way other boys learn scripture, and by his early twenties he is clearing six thousand a year in note brokerage while quietly buying into every new streetcar franchise he can reach. What makes him dangerous is not greed alone but appetite: he wants the inside of every deal and the woman he cannot have, and he treats both as problems of arrangement. His rise through Philadelphia's corrupt franchise politics sets the novel's engine in motion and makes his eventual collision with the men who made him inevitable.

Aileen Butler

Aileen is the beautiful, dashing daughter of a political boss, raised Catholic and accustomed to being adored, and she falls for Cowperwood with a fervor that matches his own. To him she is not merely a mistress but a link between the wonderful days before the panic and a still-to-be-triumphant future, and he refuses to give her up even when discretion would save him. Her presence turns a financial scandal into a moral one, and the rumor of their connection does as much damage to Cowperwood's case as any ledger.

George W. Stener

Stener is a real-estate and insurance man of no particular gifts who is elevated to city treasurer because he is faithful, useful for drumming up votes, and utterly without ambition of his own. He is not a bad fellow; he is simply weak, a puppet in the hands of Butler, Mollenhauer, and Simpson, and it is precisely this weakness that makes him valuable to Cowperwood. Their partnership, built on Stener's willingness to sign what he does not fully understand, is the hinge on which the novel's central financial crime turns.

Edward Malia Butler

Butler is one of the three men who jointly run the city's politics, a hard, grim, experienced operator whose word shapes who gets elected and who gets franchises. His tenderness for Aileen, his first baby girl, is the one soft place in a life of machine politics, and the discovery of her affair with Cowperwood strikes him as a betrayal he cannot think his way out of. His grief and rage will determine whether Cowperwood's fall is merely financial or total, and his divided loyalty between fatherhood and the political order he upholds drives the novel's middle act.

Henry Worthington Cowperwood

Henry Cowperwood is a trustworthy, sound-organization man, known to the Drexels and the Bank of the United States as a most reliable individual, and he rises steadily without ever being called brilliant. He is pleased by young Frank's fascination with discounts, collateral, and the British East India Company shares worth four times their face value, and he explains the machinery of money with patient pride. His quiet, respectable world is the baseline against which his son's spectacular and unscrupulous ascent—and eventual crash—will be measured.

Mrs. Henry W. Cowperwood

Frank's mother, a quiet and supportive presence in the family.