☆ Local English profs' favorite books on business are fierce, dark, gritty—and unputdownable
We've noticed that a lot of literature depicts free enterprise in caricature, from Dickens' cartoonishly greedy businessmen to American Psycho's thesis that capitalism makes men into crazed murderers (!). But the reality of how business plays into society—as Bay Area English professors explore, with seven book rec's—is much more complex. And fascinating. An Opp Now exclusive.
Enda Duffy, UC Santa Barbara English professor: The best novels about business were written over a hundred years ago, and they are French.
The finest of the lot might be Emile Zola's L'Assommoir. The fierce determination of Gervaise to set up a laundry business, a home, and a family against all the odds in a working-class area of Paris will haunt you.
Every book by Honore de Balzac is riven with the drama of business. He himself wrote at such a furious pace: he was the pinnacle of writer-as-business person. He has many books about the business life, such The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau, about the basically honest owner of a perfume shop who gets sucked into a building speculation scheme; however, all his books prize business acumen. The best of them all is Lost Illusions, about young Lucien who only has his looks and a little talent as he tries—and almost succeeds—to make it in the cutthroat bright lights, big city world of Paris.
After those, American writers, strangely enough, seem a lot more cynical about business. Try, for example, The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe.
Maria Judnick, Santa Clara University English lecturer: As someone who grew up in the Bay Area and teaches California literature, I’m recommending books related to our Golden State.
First, Richard Henry Dana described this frontier land to the East Coast in Two Years Before the Mast, his account of his time as a common sailor, trading animal hides at coastal ports. Twenty-four years later in 1859, he returned to add to his book, regaling readers with the news that San Francisco was now a “great centre of a world-wide commerce” after the Gold Rush.
A very different story of Bay Area business was revealed by Frank Norris in his texts McTeague (1899) and The Octopus (1901). Inspired by French Naturalists like Emile Zola, Norris’ stories often focused on the darker aspects of Western life. McTeague, the story of a poor dentist who murders his wife to control their lottery winnings, reveals the evils of greed. The Octopus, the first in an unfinished trilogy “The Epic of the Wheat” delves into the conflicts between farmers and the railroad industry in the San Joaquin Valley. And while both texts warn against avarice, The Octopus offers some hope: "Evil is short-lived. Never judge of the whole round of life by the mere segment you can see. The whole is, in the end, perfect."
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