The Bulwark

Plot summary

Allusions to actual history

• Quaker figures by George Fox and John Woolman, with his Journals, are mentioned.
• Financiers such as Nicholas Biddle, Anthony Joseph Drexel I, George Dunton Widener, the Vanderbilt family, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller are mentioned.

  Allusions to other works

• The Quaker Book of Discipline and the Bible are mentioned.
• Mrs Tennet tells Orville about Fairy Berulyne. Later, Volida lends Etta a copy of The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, fils. Later, Etta also reads La Cousine Bette by Balzac, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and Daudet's Sappho.
• Jack and the Beanstalk, Charles Perrault's Bluebeard, and Sinbad the Sailor are also mentioned.

  Literary significance and criticism

• Theodore Dreiser started working on this novel as early as 1914. It was published posthumously, one year after Dreiser's death.
• Dreiser read John Woolman's Journals in 1939. It has been suggested that Dreiser's reading of Thoreau in 1938 influenced some passages.
• The novel has been described as an allegory, where Solon is the figure of a saint. Moreover, it has been suggested that Solon Barnes was informed by Theodore Dreiser's own father, John Paul Dreiser.