in The Dreiser Edition series in 2003. At this stage only chapter numbers are
available.
3 Theodore Dreiser, “Heard in the Corridors”, ed. T. D. Nostwich (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988), pp. 6–8.
4 Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days, ed. T. D. Nostwich (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 166.
5 “Haunts of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore
Dreiser, vol. 1 (ed.) Yoshinobu Hakutani (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), p. 58.
6 H. L. Mencken, “Dreiser’s Novel,” in S. T. Joshi (ed.), H. L. Mencken on American Literature (Athena: Ohio University Press, 2002), p. 45.
7 Theodore Dreiser, “The Myth of Individuality,” in American Mercury 31, March 1934: 337–342.
8 Theodore Dreiser, Twelve Men, ed. Robert Coltrane (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 1.
9 Theodore Dreiser, “True Art Speaks Plainly,” reprinted in Donald Pizer, ed.,
Theodore Dreiser: A Selection of Uncollected Prose (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), p. 155.
10 Theodore Dreiser, “Talks with Four Novelists: Mr. Dreiser,” in Pizer, Uncollected Prose, pp. 163–164.
11 Jack Salzman, ed., Theodore Dreiser: The Critical Reception (New York: David Lewis, 1972), pp. 5, 14.
12 Dreiser, Newspaper Days, p. 616.
45
t h o m as p. r i g g i o
13 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), p. 499.
14 Dreiser, Newspaper Days, p. 651.
15 Ibid., p. 620.
16 Quoted in Vera Dreiser, My Uncle Theodore (New York: Nash Publishing, 1976), p. 86.
17 Dreiser, A Traveler at Forty, ch. 47.
18 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 454.
19 Henry Miller, The Books in My Life (New York: New Directions, 1952), p. 37.
20 Theodore Dreiser, manuscript of Dawn, at the Lilly Library, Indiana University (Bloomington).
21 Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871–1907 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1986), p. 212.
22 Carl Dresser to Theodore Dreiser, 16 October 1908, original in the Dreiser Collection, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
23 Theodore Dreiser, “This Madness – The Story of Elizabeth,” Hearst’s
International–Cosmopolitan 86 (April 1929): 81–85, 117–120; 86 (May 1929): 80–83, 146–154.
24 Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers (New York: The Viking Press, 1969), p. xii.
25 H. L. Mencken, “Dreiser’s Novel,” p. 45.
26 Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912), p. 1.
Dreiser cut this quotation from Richard III in the 1927 revised version.
27 Dreiser, The Financier, p. 780.
28 Theodore Dreiser, Dawn (New York: Horace Liveright, Inc., 1931), pp. 94–95.
29 Dreiser, “A Lesson from the Aquarium,” in Pizer, Uncollected Prose, pp. 159–162.
30 Dreiser, Newspaper Days, pp. 132–135.
31 Clare Virginia Eby, Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
32 Theodore Dreiser, “Nigger Jeff,” in Howard Fast (ed.), The Best Short Stories of Theodore Dreiser (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1947), p. 182.
G U I D E T O F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Dudley, Dorothy. Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free. New York: Robert Hass, 1932.
Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press: 1985.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and American Writing in America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1985.
Richin, Moses (ed.). The American Gospel of Success. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965.
46
3
PA U L G I L E S
Dreiser’s style
Although the question of Dreiser’s style is a complex one, involving consid-
erations of ethnicity as well as aesthetics, to critics of the Cold War gen-
eration the very notion of analyzing Dreiser’s formal skills appeared a flat
contradiction in terms. Lionel Trilling’s famous discussion of Dreiser in The Liberal Imagination (1950), where he declared that Dreiser “writes badly”
and “thinks stupidly,” set the tone within the post-war American academy
for the institutionalization of Henry James as a writer of the highest artistic
“quality” and the downgrading of Dreiser as a sympathizer with the Com-
munist Party who lacked “flexibility of mind.” Trilling charged Dreiser not
only with “vulgar materialism” and a “doctrinaire anti-Semitism,” but also,
when he did address the question of style, with a tendency toward “bookish-
ness.” In phrases such as “a scene more distingué than this,” argued Trilling,
Dreiser’s style is “precisely literary in the bad sense; he is full of flowers of rhetoric and shines with paste gems.”
In his view of Dreiser’s rhetorical inauthenticity, Trilling was explicitly
taking exception to what he described as F. O. Matthiessen’s acquiescence in
“the liberal cliché which opposes crude experience to mind.”1 Dreiser had
been the subject of Matthiessen’s last book, published posthumously in 1951,
which, in its portrayal of Dreiser as a forerunner of Popular Front socialism,
can be understood as the final installment of Matthiessen’s effort, begun
in American Renaissance (1941), to align American literary culture with a progressive, communitarian spirit. Associations between Dreiser and the
representation of “crude experience” also appear, less disparagingly, in Saul
Bellow’s 1951 comment on the usefulness of Dreiser’s “journalistic habits,”
through which, according to Bellow, his fiction “captures things that per-
haps could not be taken in other ways – common expressions, flatnesses,
forms of thought, the very effect of popular literature itself.” Bellow’s point here was that Dreiser’s “important knowledge” was not what he thought it
was: “When he is writing about his principles, in language awkwardly bor-
rowed from Herbert Spencer or Huxley, they are gone the instant he invokes
47
pau l g i l e s
them.”2 Bellow accordingly admired Dreiser more as a chronicler of every-
day life than as a philosophical sage, and his focus on the more incidental
observations running through the latter’s novels echoes the earliest reviews
of Sister Carrie (1900), which praised the work’s “unsparing realism” and its “minute detail.” This is consistent also with the author’s stated ambition, in a 1901 interview with the New York Times, simply to represent “life as it is,” “the facts as they exist.”3
This view of Dreiser as “a newspaperman deepened,” to use Bellow’s
phrase, turned him into an honorary literary forefather of Ernest Heming-
way, another writer in the tough journalistic mode.4 It also encouraged the
myth of Dreiser’s iconoclastic “trampling down the lies of gentility and Vic-
torianism, of Puritanism and academicism,” as Alfred Kazin put it. Kazin,
one of Dreiser’s literary executors, placed emphasis in his own influential
book, On Native Grounds (1955), on how naturalism for Dreiser was not
merely a “literary idea” but an “instinctive response to life,” a direct reac-
tion to the growth of “the great industrial cities that had within the memory
of a single generation transformed the American landscape.”5 During the
1950s, Dreiser’s style consequently became the subject of political debate
between academics such as Trilling and John Berryman – who, though ad-
miring Dreiser’s “artless” quality, talked also of his stylistic “ineptitude” and suggested he “wrote like a hippopotamus” – and urban intellectuals such as
Bellow and Kazin, who extolled Dreiser’s flight from formalist pretension
and intellectual snobbery into the more robust world of modern American
experience.6 Recent recollections from Paul Lauter on the shape of the aca-
demic canon in the 1950s, and Dreiser’s rigid exclusion from it, reinforce
this sense of how “caste” and “class” played a major role in the positioning
of Dreiser’s literary reputation at this time; for those whose reading skills
were honed by the values of New Criticism, a negative response to Dreiser’s
labyrinthine style became a necessary touchstone for a certain kind of
“literary” sensitivity.7 The disapproval of these academic critics would have
been heightened by a proclivity that Dreiser never quite overcame for occa-
sionally using the wrong word: “fatuitously” instead of fatuously, “objec-
tional” rather than objectionable, and so on. Such orthographic eccentricities
were not remarked upon merely by pernickety Yale or Columbia scholars;
back in 1901, in a review of Sister Carrie, the Chicago Daily Tribune commented adversely on Dreiser’s “blunders in English.”8
The author himself tended to be impatient with those who corrected his
grammar and spelling rather than attending to the larger scope of his vi-
sion, and, obviously enough, one of the major strengths of Dreiser’s work is
its capacity to bring into view the new scenes and situations of urban life.
These were the scenes – ugly, vulgar, or otherwise lacking in the virtues of
48
Dreiser’s style
gentility – which had been overlooked or occluded in the more rural fic-
tions of late-nineteenth-century writers like, say, Sarah Orne Jewett. In this
sense, Dreiser’s style, through its demystification of etiolated romance and
sentimental fantasy, specifically refuses the utopian prospect of nostalgic re-
treat or transcendental escape. Although the characters in his novels move
around between various geographical locations, there never seems to be a
possibility for them of pastoral retreat into a world of psychological renewal
because they are never granted an inner self immune from the exigencies of
the marketplace. There is a revealing moment near the beginning of Sister