print according to no discernible pattern. One can contrast this haphazard
state of affairs to the more orderly plan seen for writers who stayed with
a single publisher, or who switched houses only once. For example, since
his death Frost’s poetry has been managed by Henry Holt, the only Ameri-
can imprint with which he ever published. Fitzgerald and Hemingway have
been entirely under the Scribner umbrella during their posthumous careers.16
Mencken, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler are still marketed as
Knopf authors. Willa Cather’s copyrights are divided between two houses,
Houghton Mifflin and Knopf, who cooperate with each other in issuing her
books. Wharton’s are similarly split between two cooperating publishers,
Scribners and Appleton. Faulkner’s books, with the exception of two early
novels that he published with Liveright, are all under the imprint of Random
House. Dreiser’s copyrights, by contrast, have been spread among various
publishing houses, no one of which has owed him undivided loyalty.17
Dreiser’s mistrustfulness also extended to literary agents. He did not en-
gage a full-time agent to manage his affairs; he tended to use one only on the
odd occasion when he felt that he needed a representative as a buffer. Often
he asked friends to handle negotiating chores for him. Dreiser likely believed
that he knew book and magazine publishing as well as any agent did and
that he could secure favorable terms with editors and publishers without
having to pay an agent ten percent off the top.18 Dreiser was probably right:
certainly he had learned the ins and outs of literary business over the years;
he might also have enjoyed sparring over money with editors and publishers.
The consequences of this attitude, however, have probably not been good
for Dreiser’s posthumous career. His estate has never been represented by a
recognized agency or a law firm that specializes in literary business – as have the estates of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Lewis, and Thomas Wolfe, for example.
All of these writers remain in competition with Dreiser, for book sales and
for places in the canon of American literature. Dreiser’s unwillingness, in life, to ally himself with a strong literary agency has left his writings at something of a disadvantage since his death.19
Still, Dreiser did well. He was a frugal man, willing to live in rented rooms
and to scrape by on low bank balances until the movie money from An
American Tragedy came in. He lost some of that money but eventually righted his finances and was able to continue supporting himself until he died. He
never had to return to editing: he wrote steadily, recycled his writings in
the ways that were available to him, and was as successful as most of his
contemporaries. Such a record is commendable.
26
Dreiser and the profession of authorship
N O T E S
1 For a selection of Dreiser’s newspaper work from 1892 to 1895, see
T. D. Nostwich, ed., Theodore Dreiser: Journalism, Volume One (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988).
2 Nancy Warner Barrineau, ed. Theodore Dreiser’s “Ev’ry Month” (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
3 Dreiser’s best magazine work from this period is available in Yoshinobu Hakutani, ed., Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser: Life and Art in the American 1890s, 2 vols. (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985, 1987).
4 Donald Pizer, “Introduction: A Summer at Maumee,” in The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), pp. 4–5.
5 The compositional history of the novel is given in “Sister Carrie: Manuscript to Print,” in Sister Carrie, ed. John C. Berkey, Alice M. Winters, James L. W. West III, and Neda M. Westlake (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), pp. 503–541.
6 See the 1902–03 Philadelphia diary in Dreiser’s American Diaries, 1902–1926, ed.
Thomas P. Riggio, James L. W. West III, and Neda M. Westlake (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), pp. 53–113. Dreiser’s own account of his recovery from depression is found in his unfinished book An Amateur Laborer, ed.
Richard W. Dowell, James L. W. West III, and Neda M. Westlake (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).
7 Medicine and law were already firmly established as professions by Dreiser’s time.
The American Medical Association had been chartered in 1847 and the Amer-
ican Bar Association in 1878. The standard study of the professions in Amer-
ica is Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism (New York: Norton, 1976). Still valuable is A. M. Carr-Saunders and P. A. Wilson, The Professions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). The five traditional professions are medicine, law, divinity, college or university pedagogy, and the military (primarily the officer class).
8 A good history of the Book-of-the-Month Club is Charles Lee, The Hidden Public: The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club (Garden City: Doubleday, 1958). More recent treatments include Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middle/brow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), and Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Two standard histories of softcover publishing are Frank L. Schick, The Paperbound Book in America (New York: Bowker, 1958), and Thomas L. Bonn, Under Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass-Market Paperbacks (New York: Penguin, 1982).
9 Dreiser had to share royalties from the play with Patrick Kearney, who adapted An American Tragedy for the stage. Details of the contract (which survives in the files of the American Play Company, Berg Collection, New York Public
Library) are found in James L. W. West III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), p. 136.
27
ja m e s l . w. w e s t i i i
10 Dreiser’s infamous dispute with Horace Liveright over the movie money for An American Tragedy is covered in Walker Gilmer, Horace Liveright: Publisher of the Twenties (New York: David Lewis, 1970), and in Tom Dardis, Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright (New York: Random House, 1995).
11 From The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (New York: Knopf, 1932), p. 48.
12 See At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 35–36. See also James L. W. West III, “Dreiser and Random House,”
Dreiser Newsletter 15 (Fall 1984): 13–17.
13 These were Dreiser’s originating publishers; they held copyright on his books.
The reprinters mentioned earlier in this chapter only leased the printing plates of some of his books for fixed periods; they did not hold copyright to these titles.
14 The collapse of Liveright was hard on Dreiser because the copyrights for his most valuable books were held by the firm. While bankruptcy settlements were
being made, Dreiser’s books (and those of many other Liveright authors, such as Sherwood Anderson) received little attention, advertising, or marketing.
15 The only collected edition of Dreiser’s writings in English to appear so far was issued in Japan: twenty volumes, photo-offset from the first-edition texts, published in Kyoto in 1981 by the Rinsen Book Co. A twelve-volume collected edition in
Russian was published in 1955; a ten-volume series in Serbo-Croatian was issued in Czechoslovakia in 1973. See Section AA of Donald Pizer, Richard W. Dowell,
and Frederic E. Rusch, Theodore Dreiser: A Primary Bibliography and Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), p. 23.
16 Hemingway published his first American book, In Our Time, with Liveright in 1925, but when he switched to Scribners he brought the copyright to that short-story collection with him. All of his subsequent books were published by Scrib-
ners, including several books published posthumously from manuscripts that he
left at his death.
17 A scholarly edition of Dreiser’s writings has been under way since 1981. The first volumes were published by the University of Pennsylvania Press; recently the edition has moved to the University of Illinois Press. As Dreiser’s copyrights enter the public domain, their management comes to the University of Pennsylvania,
where his literary papers are housed.
18 Raymond Chandler, “Ten Per Cent of Your Life,” Atlantic Monthly 189 (February 1952).
19 “Harold Dies and the Dreiser Trust,” Dreiser Studies 19 (Spring 1988): 26–31.
G U I D E T O F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Anesko, Michael. “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Bernheim, Alfred L. The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750–1932. New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1964.
Cheney, O. H. Economic Survey of the Book Industry, 1930–1931. National Association of Book Publishers, 1931; reprint New York: Bowker, 1960.
Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut, in collaboration with Lawrence C. Wroth and Rollo
G. Silver. The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States. 2nd edn. New York: Bowker, 1951.
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Dreiser and the profession of authorship
Madison, Charles A. Book Publishing in America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.
Mott, Frank Luther. Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States.