By 1912 Dreiser would also offer a major challenge to the mythology of
the virtuous captains of industry in The Financier, the first novel of a trilogy –
including The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947) – based on the life of the railway tycoon Charles T. Yerkes. These books show the rapaciousness as well
as the genius of the master money-makers, who lived in nothing like the apo-
litical, conventional, and Eveless paradise inhabited by the titans of Success.
Dreiser’s financier Cowperwood is as practical, shrewd, and hardworking
as any Success personality, but his major characteristic is, as H. L. Mencken put it, a desire for “power, and the way power commonly visualizes itself in
this mind as a means to beauty . . . an aloof voluptuousness, a dignified he-
donism . . . And with this over-development of the aesthetic sense there goes,
naturally enough, an under-development of the ethical sense. Cowperwood
has little more feeling for right or wrong, save as a setting or a mask for
beauty, than a healthy schoolboy.”6 As Mencken understood, Dreiser’s care-
ful adaptation of the life of Yerkes and the financial world he occupied was
a major contribution to the collective portrait of the American businessman.
The future novelist came away from the experience of working for Marden
having discovered the value of writing lives to convey the nature of “reality.”
Dreiser saw the potential in the lives of extraordinary people for material on
which he might test and dramatize his philosophical and social ideas. None
of this came naturally to him, in part because nothing in his background
led him to believe in what he would later term “the myth of individuality.”7
He would, nevertheless, later expand the embryonic character sketches of
Success into the biographical narratives in books such as Twelve Men and A Gallery of Women (1929). He used these later sketches to deflate the
standards set by Success and to redefine the meaning of what constitutes success (and failure). These books present a different set of Americans – men
and women who resist the social codes of the time and do not fit easily into
the traditional view of types portrayed by Marden. They include figures such
as Rourke, the Irish construction foreman who values his men more than the
corporate powers that profit from their labor; Charlie Potter, the minister
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t h o m as p. r i g g i o
who lives without material gain while serving others, not satisfying himself;
Louis Sonntag, the lonely artist whose dreams end in early death on a war
assignment; “Rona Murtha,” whose success in business does not exempt her
from a messy personal life; “Ernita,” whose idealism leads her to socialist
and pacifist positions and to expatriation in the Soviet Union.
The distance between the early and later success motif in Dreiser can be
measured by the following passage from Twelve Men, in which the narrator sums up “Peter” with a reflection on the meaning of such a life:
He was free – spiritually, morally, in a thousand ways, it seemed to me. As one drags through this inexplicable existence one realizes how such qualities stand out; not the pseudo freedom of strong men, financially or physically, but the
real internal, spiritual freedom, where the mind, as it were, stands up and looks at itself, faces Nature unafraid, is aware of its own weaknesses, its strengths; examines its own and the creative impulses of the universe and of men with a
kindly and non-dogmatic eye.8
Success didn’t provide its readers with this sort of education. Its articles naturally sought to highlight the simple virtues, not the complexities, in
the lives of the rich and famous. But the questions Dreiser asked remained
remarkably consistent throughout his career. Why do some rise in their fields,
while others succumb to the forces of nature and society? What ethical values
promote well-being? What personal qualities lead to a good life? In his drive
to understand, Dreiser was himself a perfect representative of a generation
for whom the philosophical certainties and practical guidelines of an earlier
day no longer were self-evident. He intuitively understood this and placed
himself as a bemused observer on the same page with his subjects. It was
a technique he carried into his later biographical sketches, as he continued
to puzzle over the deceptively simple question that Marden placed at the
center of “The Life Stories of Successful Men”: What makes for real success
in life?
II
In his freelance period, Dreiser wrote about artists as frequently as he did
businessmen. As one might expect from a writer whose most autobiograph-
ical novel, The “Genius” (1915), uses a painter as his alter-ego, Dreiser’s aesthetic approximated the methods of the painters, sculptors, and photographers about whom he wrote. The late nineteenth century was as preoccupied
with the visual arts as we are today, and Dreiser’s emphasis on capturing the
“color” and presenting “pictures” of his age reflects the widespread cross-
fertilization between writing and the visual arts. (His interviews with Alfred
34
Dreiser and the uses of biography
Stieglitz and William Louis Sonntag, for example, show him scrutinizing
techniques for capturing mood and setting that he would soon apply to his
fiction.) Having made a name in this field, he received an offer by the painter J. Scott Hartley to assemble an album, with a biographical introduction,
devoted to his father-in-law, the landscape painter George Inness. He never
wrote a full-length biography, but when he turned to fiction Dreiser grav-
itated naturally towards such biographical subjects who, if not specifically
artists, possessed what he called the “artistic temperament.”
This inclination had something to do with the writers who were his models.
When Dreiser began his first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), he was strongly influenced by the new realism practiced by the French, Russian, and English
naturalists. Many young writers of his day absorbed the idea that fiction
could replicate reality, even to the point of scientific exactness. Not surprisingly, Dreiser’s earliest comments on the aims of fiction might have been
made by a biographer or historian: “to tell the truth,” he said, is the “sum
and substance of literary as well as social morality” and the “extent of all
reality is the realm of the author’s pen.”9 He thought of Sister Carrie “as a book that is close to life. It is intended not as a piece of literary craftsmanship, but as a picture of conditions done as simply and effectively as the English
language will permit.”10 Dreiser’s brand of realism pitted his work against
such popular “literary” genres as the historical romance and the sentimental
novel. His most consistent way of grounding his fiction in the “extent of all
reality” was to turn to real-life sources.
Sister Carrie is the first major example of the way Dreiser’s biographical imagination turned run-of-the-mill cultural paradigms into world-class writing. The novel employs two familiar motifs of nineteenth-century literature.
The folk tale of the simple country girl seduced by the lures of the city (or
someone from the city) had wide currency from Goethe’s Faust (1808; 1831) to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). The equally ubiquitous fable of a young woman who rises above her lowly origins as a theatrical
star was taken to brutally realistic limits in Zola’s Nana (1880). By the time Dreiser began Sister Carrie, these familiar plots were no longer the subject of great novels or plays, though they remained staples of popular culture in
melodrama and opera. In fact, narratives of so-called “fallen women” had
by then become clichés of urban journalism. Reviewers of the novel in 1900
agreed about one thing: Carrie “follows the usual course revealed so shock-
ingly in the daily press from day to day,” and that she is “a young woman
whose career can almost be paralleled by that of a million others in large
cities of our country.”11
With the novels of Balzac and Hardy in mind, Dreiser at first wrote swiftly
and with a sympathy for Carrie that was rare in books about such women.
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t h o m as p. r i g g i o
In hindsight the empathy seems fitting, since we now know that he had heard
such stories at home before he read them in novels. Hadn’t his sisters Mame,
Emma, Sylvia, and Theresa told him about the excitement of their first train
rides into Chicago? Hadn’t they visited home decked out like models in the
fashion pages of Harper’s Bazar? Hadn’t he heard his parents lament the way they drifted in and out of sexual affairs in a careless, dependent way?
And hadn’t he followed in their footsteps? These memories turned him into
an avid reader of books and plays dealing with the Anna Kareninas and
Maggies of the world. But early memories alone could not get him through
the ordeal of writing a long novel of his own. The book proceeded well
as long as he didn’t stray from the predictable narrative. A poor girl being