Before You Begin

Before you begin.

Into the offices of one of New York's most powerful corporation law firms there drifts, on a December afternoon, a girl in search of work at stenography and typewriting. She is blonde, plainly dressed, self-effacing to the point of invisibility — "as unimportant and obscure an atom as the city hid in its vast ferment." Her name is Hallowell. No one gives her a second look. No one, that is, except Frederick Norman, the youngest and most brilliant partner in the firm, a man who bends the law to the will of railway barons and answers to no one.

David Graham Phillips was one of the great muckraking voices of America's Gilded Age, a journalist and novelist who made his name exposing the machinery of money and power. In The Grain of Dust he turns that searching eye on a single human weakness. Norman is a man who has mastered every adversary, every court, every appetite — until an obscure typist lodges in his mind like a single grain of dust in flawless clockwork, and the whole magnificent engine begins to seize.

The novel endures as a sharp, modern study of obsession and power: of a strong man discovering there is one thing in the world he cannot command, buy, or reason away — another person's free heart — and of what it costs him, and makes of him, to learn it.

This illustrated edition gathers the story into six visual movements — recap plates you unlock as you read, each drawing together the cast, the city, and the turns of the story so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page and step into the marble offices and lit avenues of 1911 New York, where a single grain of dust stops the great clockwork of power.