Martin Dressler
Subtitle: the tale of an American dreamer
By: Steven Millhauser.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Crown
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 294
Subjects: Businesspeople -- New York (State) -- New York -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction.
Description: Young Martin Dressler begins his career as a helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top. His visions grow more and more fantastical as he plans his ultimate creation: the Grand Cosmo, in which he attempts to capture the entire world and its dreams.

Accompanied on this journey by two sisters - one a dreamlike shadow, the other a wordly business partner - Martin walks a haunted line between fantasy and reality, madness and ambition, art and industry. The Grand Cosmo is his triumph and his undoing, the bold conclusion to this biography of the twentieth-century notion of progress, this mesmerizing journey to the heart of the American dream.