A Cool Million presents the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, piece by piece. As a satire of the Horatio Alger myth of success, the novel is evocative of Voltaire's Candide, which satirized the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope. Pitkin is a typical Schlemiel, stumbling from one situation to the next; he gets robbed, cheated, unjustly arrested, frequently beaten and exploited.