The Financier
Of all the books on this list, my personal favorite (and I love all of them, just this one the most). Frank Cowperwood shows an exceptional talent for business at a very young age. He parlays this gift into a great success, in Chicago in the early part of the 20th century, and then makes some questionable decisions about money, romance and politics, which leads to you to realize that the dilemmas executives face today haven’t changed much from what they were then.
Theodore Dreiser