marketplace? As it turns out, Dreiser did as well as most of his contempo-
raries. Wharton’s novels sold strongly, and she made some significant sales
of serial and drama rights, but she still had to fall back on family money
and income from her husband during her early career. Henry James envied
Wharton’s popularity: because his clothbound editions paid little in the
way of royalties, he spent much energy attempting (without much success)
to write drama scripts that would bring in returns from New York and
London stage productions. Jack London worked hard to make himself into a
“brand-name” author, one whose writings were in constant demand by pub-
lishers and readers, but London overspent his royalties and, toward the end
of his life, found himself worn out and low on inspiration. Robert Frost, who
21
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Dreiser and the profession of authorship
was only three years younger than Dreiser, was helped early by a generous
grandfather; later he had to accept teaching posts at colleges and universities in order to pay his expenses. Dreiser’s friend H. L. Mencken had steady
income from his work as a journalist and magazine editor, but his needs
were small: he lived in Baltimore in his family home for most of his life and
was a married man for only five years. Sinclair Lewis probably earned more
from his writing than any other serious writer of Dreiser’s time, but in the
1920s Lewis had the benefit of a publisher, Alfred Harcourt, who devoted
nearly all of the resources of his house to merchandising Lewis’s novels,
especially the bestsellers Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and Elmer Gantry (1927). In the 1930s and 1940s the prolific Lewis continued to turn out strong-selling books; his literary fortunes during these
years were handled first by Doubleday and then by Random House, two
firms that understood the value of strong advertising.
Things improved for the generation of authors that followed Dreiser, but
only a little. Ernest Hemingway had to depend on the family money of his
first two wives until he was able to live from the proceeds of bestsellers such as For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
F. Scott Fitzgerald, always improvident with money, earned a great deal from
his magazine fiction but did only moderately well with his novels and scored
only once with significant subsidiary-rights income – for stage and screen
adaptations of The Great Gatsby (1925). William Faulkner trained himself to write magazine fiction and made some sales to the Post and the American Mercury, but in the 1930s and 1940s Faulkner had to sell his talents to Hollywood as a scriptwriter, work that he hated. E. E. Cummings earned
practically nothing from his poetry until late in his career, when he prospered from public readings and appearances on college campuses. Edmund Wilson
got by on literary journalism, advances from book publishers, occasional
teaching and lecturing, and money extracted from his widowed mother.
Dreiser did as well as most of these contemporaries and competitors. He
had been disciplined early in his writing life to turn out newspaper copy
regularly, and he was only rarely afflicted by writer’s block. He actually
liked to write, taking an almost tactile pleasure in the act of composition.
His friend George Jean Nathan, an editor and journalist, admired this quality
in Dreiser. Nathan wrote:
Of all the writers whom I know intimately, Dreiser is the only one who actually enjoys the physical business of writing. Whereas the rest of these men hate the actual business of putting their thoughts and inspirations upon paper, complain bitterly of the dreadful chore that literary composition is, and do all sorts of things to try to divert themselves from the misery that envelops them when they 23
ja m e s l . w. w e s t i i i
sit down to their desks, Dreiser would rather write than do anything else. He
looks forward to the day’s job as another writer looks impatiently ahead to the hour when it will be finished. “I am a writer; I like to write; and I am wretched when I don’t write,” he has told me. “If I don’t produce three thousand words
a day, I’m unhappy.”11
For Dreiser this pleasure in writing did not carry over, alas, to his dealings
with publishers. He had a bad attitude toward publishers, perhaps as a result
of his early difficulties with Frank Doubleday over Sister Carrie and perhaps also as a consequence of his own experience as an editor – experience that
had taught him the small subterfuges and dishonesties to which at least some
publishers are prone. Dreiser seems to have been immune to the avuncular
attitudes of publishers; he did not trust them and did not want to cede
authority to them in any of the decisions, minor or major, of book publishing.
He tended to be difficult and balky about revisions, and he could be churlish
about money. With Horace Liveright he went so far as to check the royalty
books regularly in search of deliberate errors in Liveright’s favor.12
Cranky behavior of this sort does not endear writers to publishers, but
they will tolerate it so long as the writer’s works sell briskly. A publisher will absorb a fair amount of pettiness from an author if that author’s writings are
popular, but if the works have little public appeal, then the publisher’s pa-
tience will grow thin. This seems to have been what happened with Dreiser.
He had only one genuine bestseller in his career – An American Tragedy –
and that came fairly late in the game, in 1925, a quarter-century after the
publication of Sister Carrie. Dreiser’s other novels sold in respectable numbers but were hardly stellar performers. As a result he was usually carried
by the houses that published him as a succès d’estime, an author whose
books added heft to the list but did little for the balance sheet. The works
of such authors are dutifully manufactured by their publishers but are not
pushed in the marketplace with strong advertising or attractive discounts to
booksellers. The resulting modest sales figures are predictable.
Dreiser’s difficulties with publishers caused him to change imprints nu-
merous times during his career. The initial editions of his novels, autobio-
graphical writings, and collections of stories and non-fiction were published
successively by Doubleday, Page, and Company; Harper and Brothers; Cen-
tury Company; John Lane Company; Boni and Liveright; Horace Liveright,
Inc.; Simon and Schuster; Modern Age Books; and Doubleday again.13 Not
all of this shifting was Dreiser’s fault: John Lane, for example, was a tony
British publisher who tried to make a go of it in the United States but failed, forcing Dreiser to seek a new house. The Liveright imprint, to which Dreiser
24
Dreiser and the profession of authorship
2 and 3 Pictorial wrappers for the first two paperback editions ever published of Dreiser novels. Both texts were abridged, and both were issued in 1949, four years after his death, Dreiser Papers, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennysylvania.
moved, itself went bankrupt in 1933, largely as a result of Horace Liveright’s
propensity for gambling on bestsellers and Broadway productions.14 The
upshot was that Dreiser’s works were never managed as an oeuvre, a body of writing over which one publisher had complete control.
Writers who are able to keep all of their copyrights under one roof usually
benefit during their lives from attentive publishing. Their heirs benefit simi-
larly after their deaths. If a publisher controls all of the writings of an author, it is to that publisher’s advantage to keep all (or nearly all) of the writer’s works in print, often in a uniform edition of some kind. The alternative,
which one nearly always sees with a writer whose copyrights have been scat-
tered, is that only the best-known titles are kept alive by the publishers who
hold rights to them. The other books are allowed to expire on the backlists
of various other houses.
This is more or less what happened to Dreiser during his lifetime, and
even after his death. Each time he moved to a new publisher there was talk
of a collected edition (a mark of achievement for a prominent writer be-
fore World War II), but such an edition never materialized.15 After Dreiser
25
ja m e s l . w. w e s t i i i
died, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy were kept in circulation, but the other novels and the autobiographical writings slipped in and out of