 This series of novels depicts Frank Cowperwood, a businessman based on the real-life streetcar tycoon Charles Yerkes.Dreiser had attempted to complete his trilogy in the early 1930s, but he was unable to begin "The Stoic" until near the end of his life; he died before he could finish the manuscript, and his widow Helen assembled the novel's final pages.Cowperwood, still married to his estranged wife Aileen, lives with Berenice.