New York: Macmillan, 1947.
Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. 2nd edn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964.
Poggi, Jack. Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870–1967. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968.
Tebbel, John. A History of Book Publishing in the United States. 4 vols. New York: Bowker, 1972 – 81.
Wilson, Christopher P. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
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2
T H O M A S P. R I G G I O
Dreiser and the uses of biography
Like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain before him, Dreiser has been read as
a deeply autobiographical writer. We know, for instance, what Donald Pizer
means by saying that Dreiser is “not only Jeff and Davies [in ‘Nigger Jeff’] but will also be Carrie and Hurstwood, Jennie and Lester, Clyde and Roberta,
and Steward and Solon.”1 Yet these same characters can also be attributed
to Dreiser’s penchant for writing stories about people utterly unlike himself.
A short list of originals for his major characters would include his rebellious sisters, murderers, painters, financiers, show girls, his mistresses (and their relatives), prominent Quakers, ministers, politicians, his parents, and many
a New Woman of his day. His interest in them is a product of a novelist’s
natural curiosity about the men and women who inhabit his world. But in
Dreiser’s case there is also evidence of a strong attraction to formal biography.
His writing recurrently makes use of biographical genres, from the lowly
interview to more elaborate popular texts, including the criminal biography,
the biography of the businessman, and the historical novel.
Dreiser’s impulse to write concurrently in memoirs and in biographical
forms sprang from his view of himself as both a chronicler and a representa-
tive figure of his era. He shared this trait with contemporaries as different as Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Edward Bok, whose desire to break down
the division between autobiography and biography led them to write about
themselves in the third person. Dreiser was less technically experimental,
but he resembled them in blurring the distinctions between the two types of
writing. He gave high marks to the “absolutely vital, unillusioned biography
such as that of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions [and] Cellini’s Diary”2
and claimed them as models for his own work. For Dreiser, to write about
himself was at once a confessional rite and a biographical act, to be per-
formed with a diagnostic scalpel sharper than any used by his harshest critics.
Paradoxically, the very objectivity he maintained on his life story made it difficult for him to stand apart from other creatures of his imagination, so that
there is indeed a sense in which he can be seen in Carrie and Hurstwood,
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Dreiser and the uses of biography
Jennie and Lester, Cowperwood and Aileen, Clyde and Roberta, Solon and
Steward.
I
Dreiser’s career as a writer began in earnest when, as a newsman in his early
twenties, he composed special feature articles for the Chicago Globe. He quickly made a local name writing human interest stories, which he based on
the simplest form of biographical literature, the interview. He was skillful at it because he possessed the reporter’s habit of observation and because he was
a good listener. His city editor gave him a column to write called “About The
Hotels,” which purported to be interviews of visitors to local hotels. What
readers didn’t know was that Dreiser made up most of the conversations. In
one sketch, he created “R. J. Jeffery,” a Kentuckian whose story about being
lost in a cave duplicates Dreiser’s experience in a college expedition at Indiana University; in another, “William Yakey” of Bloomington describes the same
graveyards that Dreiser explored as a boy in southern Indiana.3 In these
slight sketches the young reporter did as much inventing as interviewing,
and he began a lifelong practice of inserting himself, at times rather directly, in the biographical process.
The Globe column caught the eye of the renowned editor of the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Joseph B. McCullagh, whose coverage of
Andrew Johnson’s impeachment is said to have created interview journal-
ism. McCullagh hired Dreiser, who went on to write two similar series. In
“Gossip of Chicago’s Big Show” Dreiser interviewed (and fabricated) visitors
to the 1893 World’s Fair. In “Heard in the Corridors” he contributed anec-
dotal stories formed from interviews of visitors to the city’s three largest
hotels. When the hotels failed to yield good copy, he invented as many as
six guests per day. His subjects were not all imaginary: they included fig-
ures like his songwriter brother Paul Dresser and his friend the artist Peter
McCord, who would appear more notably in the stunning biographical nar-
ratives “My Brother Paul” and “Peter” in Twelve Men (1919). Looking back on the “Heard” column, Dreiser said it had given “free rein to my wildest
imaginings . . . One could write any story one pleased – romantic, realistic
or wild – and credit it to some imaginary guest.”4 This work was his first
training in the invention of compellingly life-like characters, which would
typically retain a mixture of biography, autobiography, and wild imaginings.
In his late twenties, Dreiser sharpened his skills as an interviewer in a more
complex biographical medium. In 1897, at the onset of a two-year stretch
as a freelance writer, he met Orison Swett Marden, a skilled publicist who
had made his name (and a fortune) as the owner and manager of hotels.
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t h o m as p. r i g g i o
After going bankrupt in a national economic turndown, he found courage
and inspiration as a disciple of Samuel Smiles, whose eminently readable
Self-Help (1859) was still in vogue. He wrote a bestselling American version, Pushing to the Front: Success Under Difficulties (1894), and by the time Dreiser signed on with him, Marden was on the verge of becoming the
country’s leading self-help guru with the monthly Success. The magazine ran articles on the lives and careers of living legends in all fields, and it sent the message that even – perhaps especially – the lowly could rise in these United
States. The format included a capsule biography and an interview in which
a renowned man or woman discussed the conditions that led to fame and
wealth.
Dreiser began writing for Marden with no particular plan in mind beyond
dutifully supplying portraits of real-life Horatio Alger heroes. His magazine
credentials gave him access to personalities as various as Thomas Edison,
William Dean Howells, Emelia E. Barr, Marshall Field, Clara S. Foltz, Philip
D. Armour, and Andrew Carnegie. He borrowed most of his biographical
facts, a habit that became more apparent in articles he published elsewhere on
great Americans of the past. He did, for instance, little more than paraphrase
the research of biographers for articles on Nathaniel Hawthorne and William
Cullen Bryant. Like all attentive plagiarizers, however, Dreiser learned from
what he copied, and he augmented the facts with first-hand observation.
In the historical essays the most memorable moments are not the canned
biographies but the points at which Dreiser takes the reader into the streets
or homes or neighborhoods as they existed in the 1890s – most often to show
the ravages of time. For example, the thriving Derby wharf area surrounding
the Custom House in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, “now stretches for an eighth of a mile, a dilapidated and partially deserted structure, with its bleak sheds and decaying structures on every hand.”5
In retrospect we can see a number of ironies in Dreiser’s becoming a star
salesman of the Success venture. We have the spectacle of the author who expressed profound doubts about human freedom – and about the ability
to master one’s destiny – promoting the idea that every man (and woman)
can overcome the odds in the game of life. Moreover, the writer who would
soon expose the dark underbelly of big business is found promoting the
plans for financial gain of men such as Carnegie and Armour. The Success
formula consisted of a bowdlerized catalogue of personal attributes needed to
survive in the tough world of high finance. It advocated the old Poor Richard
values of discipline, industry, practical (not bookish) knowledge, and Yankee
shrewdness. Good works, honesty, clean living, and philanthropy topped the
list of moral virtues.
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Dreiser and the uses of biography
In his work for Marden’s enterprise, Dreiser contributed significantly to
the most benign portrait of these financial giants on the national record.
Partly for this reason, it has become customary to dismiss the Success essays as mere hackwork. This view overlooks their educational value for the many
who were facing new technologies and an industrial order for which their
formal schooling had not prepared them. Unlike modern celebrity interviews,
the magazine’s profiles were not mainly vehicles for self-display but rather,
in good Victorian fashion, they offered a plan for action in the service of the democratic rags to riches, obscurity to fame dream of upward mobility.