Dreiser researched much of his longer fiction with the fervor of a profes-
sional biographer. His novels can be seen to exist in a symbiotic relationship
with a number of modern biographical forms. He was, for instance, tempted
once again in 1912 to write a family chronicle when he met Anna Tatum,
a graduate of Wellesley who admired his writing. She told him about her
Quaker ancestors – and particularly about her devout father’s anguish over
his children, who had increasingly assumed cosmopolitan secular values.
For years Dreiser researched the lives of prominent American Quakers, read
the sect’s religious classics, and visited contemporary Quaker communities.
Thirty-odd years later the novel about a Quaker family’s trials in modern
life was published as The Bulwark (1945). Moreover, as so often occurred with women whose lives interested him, Tatum became the subject of documentary fiction in “This Madness – The Story of Elizabeth.”23
Other books depended less on personal contacts than on certain abiding
concerns. Early in his career, Dreiser had become interested in a crime that he saw as a dark version of the American success motif: the murder of a woman
who stood in the way of her lover’s dreams of social and material advance-
ment through a more advantageous marriage. For An American Tragedy
(1925) he investigated numerous case histories, many of them sensational
murders involving well-known figures such as Roland Molineux and Harry
Thaw. He finally settled on the 1906 Chester Gillette trial for the murder
of Grace Brown that occurred in the lake district of upstate New York. The
novel benefited from the popular interest in criminal biography, a form to
which Dreiser’s masterpiece gave new life as the progenitor of documentary
novels of crime such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.
As extensive as were Dreiser’s investigations for An American Tragedy, his most thoroughly researched fiction is the Cowperwood trilogy, in which he
42
Dreiser and the uses of biography
combined on a grand scale the elements of biography, autobiography, and
wild imaginings. In this case, the imaginings were not just personal. He drew
heavily on the outsized cultural images of the post-Civil War robber barons.
Dreiser’s model, Charles T. Yerkes, was well known in his day, though he
did not have the same name recognition as Rockefeller, Carnegie, or J. P.
Morgan. His career, however, included spectacular turns of fortune, financial
and amatory scandals, and a dazzling art collection – all of which appealed
to Dreiser’s sense of high drama.
For many readers, the Cowperwood trilogy ranks as, in the words of Ellen
Moers, “the most valuable historical fiction produced in this country.”24 But
to focus exclusively on the historical and biographical elements is to miss an
equally important aspect of the novels. Dreiser conceived of Cowperwood
as an heroic figure in the new economy of late nineteenth-century financial
speculation. Mencken understood that Dreiser meant Cowperwood to be an
“archetype of the American money king.”25 Dreiser accomplished this by
surrounding Cowperwood with the trappings of high adventure shared by
frontier heroes such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, Herman
Melville’s Ahab, and William Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen. Dreiser’s financier
is very much in the tradition of the flawed but larger-than-life overreachers
found in classical American literature.
In this context, Frank Cowperwood can be read figuratively as a latter-
day Ahab of the world of trade and high stakes speculation. Just as Melville
sought verisimilitude for his outlandish characters in the details of whal-
ing, Dreiser encased his improbable hero in the minutiae of business and
politics. To highlight the heroic and yet fated lives of their characters, both Melville and Dreiser surround them with Shakespearean language and allusions. Dreiser prefaced the early biographical chapters of the The Financier with a quotation from Richard III: “I came into the world feet first and was born with teeth. The nurse did prophesy that I should snarl and bite.”26 The
book ends with a detailed recasting of Yerkes’s prison experience followed
by a section called “The Magic Crystal,” in which Cowperwood is con-
fronted with the prophesies of the witches in Macbeth: “Hail to you, Frank Cowperwood, master and no master, prince of a world of dreams whose
reality was disillusion!”27
Dreiser maintained the dynamic tension between the biographical and
the heroic with the use of other eccentric elements. Fantastic passages were
drawn from science, notably the extended allegory of the mysterious Black
Grouper, “Concerning Mycteroperca Bonaci,” which accompanies “The
Magic Crystal.” In addition, the ten-year-old Frank Cowperwood’s defin-
ing moment comes when he learns the lessons of life from watching a lobster
slowly devour a squid: just as the lobster lived on the squid, so did “men
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t h o m as p. r i g g i o
live on men,” he reasons, and builds a vocation on that Darwinian law of
nature. All such moments contribute to the suprapersonal aura surrounding
the character, whose genius raises finance to the level of an art and whose
sexual appetites also contain elements of the spectacular.
How did Dreiser manage to make these novels so solidly realistic, for all
their extraordinary, even bizarre characterizations and sequences? First of
all, his extensive research into Yerkes’s life allowed him to approximate the
density of an historical narrative and to revisit the themes and topics of
the Success articles. His sources were identical to those of the biographer.
The Financier, for instance, covered the events of Yerkes’s life from his birth in Philadelphia in 1837 to his trial for embezzlement in the wake of the
financial panic that followed the devastating Chicago fire of 1871. The novel
encompasses Cowperwood’s youth, his business as a broker, his dealings in
the streetcar system of the city, and his trial and business collapse. Dreiser’s primary sources were the records in old newspapers. In addition, he consulted
histories of Philadelphia and the self-aggrandizing biographical pamphlets
Yerkes himself published. Other data came from municipal records, histories
of the period, and books on finance. Like any biographer, Dreiser traveled in
his subject’s footsteps, to Chicago for The Titan and to Europe for The Stoic, which explores Yerkes’s involvement in the London underground system. He
transcribed his data onto 8 . 5 × 11 inch sheets of paper, generally making one notation per page and listing them chronologically. They ran into hundreds
of sheets for the first volume, and eventually into thousands.
Since no biography of Yerkes existed, evidence was scarce for certain
periods, particularly his youth. For these segments Dreiser turned to tried
and proven methods: he either used his own experiences or cribbed from
sources that fit his scheme. External sources included a biography of an older
contemporary and eventual rival of Yerkes, E. P. Oberholtzer’s Jay Cooke:
Financier of the Civil War (1907), from which he borrowed liberally. In this way, he firmly anchored in biographical fact even the hardest-to-document
aspects of his archetypal hero’s life.
For other aspects of Yerkes’s youth Dreiser looked to key moments in his
own life. The street fight with Spat McGlathery early in The Financier had no counterpart in either the life of Yerkes or Cooke. The fight more nearly
parallels Dreiser’s stories of encounters with rough Irish kids in Dawn. Of course, he was no Frank Cowperwood, and in his own youth he usually left it
to his older brother Al to save the family honor.28 Cowperwood’s observation
of the lobster and squid also derives from Dreiser’s earlier insight into the
nature of survival – an experience he wrote of in an 1906 essay entitled
“A Lesson From the Aquarium.”29 Finally, one of his greatest characters,
Edward Malia Butler, the Irish politician and father of Cowperwood’s second
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Dreiser and the uses of biography
wife Aileen, comes directly from an important encounter during Dreiser’s
Chicago days, when an influential political boss named Edward Butler took
a paternal interest in the young reporter who had come to interview him.30
As in the Cowperwood trilogy, Dreiser’s major work over a long career de-
pended on the biographical vein he opened early in his writing. In fiction and
non-fiction he repeatedly utilized the methods of the biographer to explore
the world around him. From the outset, his invention was always matched
by his fascination with the lives of Americans of his day. He was, as Clare
Eby has ably demonstrated, a social critic on a par with Thorstein Veblen.31
In Dreiser’s case, the social critic was less a theorist than an observer and
recorder of the common and uncommon lives of his era. He presented their
stories, ever mindful of the precept he himself laid down for the artist: “it
was not so much the business of the writer to indict as to interpret.”32 His
fidelity to this principle makes the record valuable and still pertinent in our time.
N O T E S
1 Donald Pizer, The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), p. 25.
2 Theodore Dreiser, A Traveler at Forty (1913), ch. 51. Citations from this book are taken from a text based on an unpublished manuscript which is forthcoming