seduced by a “masher” like Drouet was well within the grasp of any alert
reader of pulp fiction. But even an attentive and talented young man from
the house of Dreiser did not know enough about motive and circumstance
to go much further and still maintain the illusion of reality.
The writing came to a halt at the point where Carrie and Hurstwood
realize they are attracted to each other. She is the “wife” of Drouet, and
Hurstwood is married and has children. Dreiser could find no way to keep
their relationship going in the face of these obstacles. The entanglement
would be far less difficult for a novelist to resolve today; in the America of
1899, to do so without consigning the two to hell was near impossible. As
a result, the novel was stalled for months. Then suddenly, for reasons now
unknown, he began to compose again with a surer sense of direction.
The writing regained momentum as Dreiser began to draw on the bio-
graphical details of a family scandal involving his sister Emma and her lover
George Hopkins. Dreiser had lived with the couple when he first came to
New York in 1894. By then Hopkins had degenerated physically and men-
tally to the point at which he was abusive and a bad example to their two
children. Emma had talked out her troubles with her brother, and he had
taken mental notes. Brother and sister then devised a plot to help her to
escape from Hopkins. In those few months, Emma became the earliest in a
long line of women to confide such intimacies to him, and he responded in
a way that became habitual over a lengthy writing career: he became preoc-
cupied with describing the events that defined the major crisis of her young
womanhood. Emma, in effect, became the first member of a wide-ranging
“gallery of women” to appear in Dreiser’s writing.
He returned to his manuscript with new energy and began to fill out his
broad outline with the details of the affair of Emma and George Hopkins.
Like Hurstwood, Hopkins had been a married man with a family and was
older than Emma; he had stolen $3,500 (it became $10,000 in the novel)
from the safe of the saloon where he was employed; and the twosome had
36
Dreiser and the uses of biography
taken flight, first to Canada and then to New York. Dreiser had heard rumors
of all this as a boy. But he couldn’t piece together the details nor understand the consequences of the affair until he observed the couple firsthand and
heard Emma’s side of the story.
It was this grounding in the reality of Hopkins’ life that inspired what
has been widely considered one of the most dramatic sequences in American
literature, the “fall” of Hurstwood. In it Dreiser stood Marden’s formula
on its head and exposed how swiftly success could sink into a loss of social
identity. His later portrait of Hopkins tells the same story:
Hopkins, from being a onetime fairly resourceful and successful and aggressive
man, had slipped into a most disconcerting attitude of weakness and all but
indifference before the onslaughts of the great city . . . he had already failed spiritually and was now living a hand-to-mouth existence . . . He appeared, as
I saw it afterwards, to be spiritually done for – played out. Like so many men
who had fought a fair battle in youth and then lost, he was weary of the game.
He saw no interesting position for him anywhere in the future, and so he was
drifting.12
The reader here may turn to the last pages of Dreiser’s novel and seamlessly
conclude with the passage in which Hurstwood drifts to a seedy room in
the Bowery and turns on the gas: “he stood there, hidden wholly in that
kindness which is night, while the uprising fumes filled the room. When the
odor reached his nostrils he quit his attitude and fumbled for the bed. ‘What’s the use,’ he said wearily, as he stretched himself to rest.”13
How biographical is this? Did Hopkins commit suicide? There is no evi-
dence that Hurstwood’s death is anything other than a product of Dreiser’s
imagination. “I know I never saw him [Hopkins] but once after,” Dreiser
wrote, “a most washed-out and deteriorated-looking person, and then he
did not see me.”14 Of course, there is no one-to-one relationship between
Hopkins and Hurstwood, any more than there is between Emma and Carrie.
Dreiser recalled himself in 1894 sitting unemployed on a bench in New
York’s City Hall Park, watching the jobless, defeated men idling in the cold
December day: “I looked at them and then considered myself and these great
offices, and it was then, if ever, that the idea of Hurstwood was born.”15
Dreiser might have more precisely said that the vision of Hurstwood ex-
isted in him before any of these events, and that it became palpable to him
at certain moments: when he looked in the mirror and saw in his face the
stress of joblessness, when he gazed at the haggard men on the park benches,
when he contemplated the down-and-out Hopkins. And it came to him most
memorably when he created Carrie’s lover later in the decade.
37
t h o m as p. r i g g i o
There were limits to what he could gather from Emma’s gossip. For one,
he was intent on making his heroine “artistic,” which for him meant she
possessed a certain refinement of temperament and a capacity for responding
to beauty. He also seemed intent on rewarding her, for which the old tale
about the sudden rise to stage celebrity was perfect. Emma was not an actress,
however, nor did she have a particularly artistic temperament. Moreover she
had children, and her instincts were more maternal than theatrical. But there
was a stage-struck sister who entered the family – and Dreiser’s imagination –
in the fall of 1899. It was then that a young woman named Louise Kerlin
walked into brother Paul Dresser’s Chicago office to audition for one of his
shows. There the famous songwriter discovered that Louise was the daughter
of William S. Kerlin, a railroad engineer and one of his boyhood heroes when
he worked on the trains peddling candy. He asked her to sing his songs,
including the beautifully sentimental Indiana State song, “On The Banks of
the Wabash.” By the time she had finished, Paul was in tears.
Suddenly he wheeled around in his chair and called a number on the telephone.
It was the Chicago Tribune . . . “I just want you to know that my kid sister,
Louise Dresser, is here in Chicago and is opening on the ‘Masonic Roof’ in a
few weeks . . . She’s been calling herself Louise Kerlin, but from now on she is Louise Dresser.”16
This encounter led to Louise Dresser’s meteoric climb to fame, first as a
vaudeville star, then as a stage actress and later in films. The story made headlines, so even if he weren’t Paul’s brother, Dreiser would have known about
his new “sister” by the time he decided to turn Carrie into an overnight stage
success. Like Emma and Hopkins, Louise Dresser provided a biographical
mechanism upon which the novelist could jumpstart his fiction when inven-
tion flagged. She had a profile that matched his heroine: the mid-western,
small town girl come to the metropolis, the discovery of talent, her early
disappointments, her swift transformation into a musical comedy star, the
title of “sister.”
Carrie Meeber’s story parallels the larger curve of Louise Dresser’s expe-
rience. But was Carrie modeled on Louise? No more (or less) than she was
modeled on Emma. In any case, Dreiser’s ability to give the time-worn pic-
ture of the fallen woman an intense aura of reality sprung in part from his
knowledge of the true adventures of these two very different sisters. More-
over, that image continued to influence Dreiser the writer over a long career –
to the point that we can see Carrie’s silhouette clearly and repeatedly behind
many a “real” fallen sister in his work.
Take, for example, Marcelle Itain. A biographical portrait of her appears
in A Traveler at Forty (1913). In 1912 Dreiser had met her in Paris where 38
Dreiser and the uses of biography
she lived as what was euphemistically called a “cocotte.” Like Carrie, she
was young and, in her untrained response to beauty, possessed the soul of an
artist, as well as an appetite for fine restaurants and hotels. Also like Carrie, she had been raised in poverty, which stimulated in her an amorphous but
ravenous desire for the fineries of the world at large. Dreiser depicts the sad, needy side of Marcelle but defends her in words that would fit easily into the
pages of Sister Carrie. “Desiring to get up, to see more of life, to entertain herself, and having an instinct for the best which the world had to offer,