marries Helen Richardson.
1945
TD’s application for membership of the Communist Party
is accepted in August.
1945
TD dies on 28 December, of heart failure.
1946
After editing by Louise Campbell and others, The Bulwark
is published by Doubleday and Co.
1947
The Stoic is published, Helen including an appendix
outlining TD’s plans for the ending.
1981
Sister Carrie, the first of the Pennsylvania Editions, is
published. This ongoing series (recently renamed the
Dreiser Edition) publishes alternate versions of TD’s works
as he originally composed them, before second-party
editing.
xx
L E O N A R D C A S S U T O A N D C L A R E V I R G I N I A E B Y
Introduction
“Dreiser more than any other man, marching alone, usually unappreciated,
often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity
and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life.
Without his pioneering, I doubt if any of us could, unless we liked to be sent
to jail, seek to express life and beauty and terror.” The speaker of these words was Sinclair Lewis, on the occasion of becoming the first American writer
to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Lewis spoke for a generation of
writers when he lauded Dreiser for sweeping aside old models and providing
American literature’s “first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman.”1 In
acknowledging Dreiser’s leadership, Lewis gave voice to a widespread feeling
in the American literary community: that Dreiser was the one who should
have won the prize.2
Dreiser’s recognition as America’s leading novelist during the period pre-
ceding World War II marked the apex of a circuitous lifetime odyssey that
saw him move from anonymity to notoriety to triumph. His work went
briefly into eclipse after his death during the heyday of the New Criticism
(which privileged modernist experimentation and looked down on Dreiser’s
straightforward storytelling). With historically oriented approaches to liter-
ature regaining ground in the past generation, Dreiser has risen once again
to a central position in the American canon. Ironically, years after his death, Dreiser is now getting what he always wanted: a uniform edition of his work,
an enterprise sponsored by two university presses.3 His fiction has become a
staple of the American literary curriculum. In short, his importance is now
assured.
Dreiser was as forward-looking a writer as the United States ever pro-
duced. His portrayals of the modernization of the United States anticipated
the issues of the twentieth century with startling clarity – and they look to
be equally illuminating of the twenty-first. His writing – not only fiction
but also autobiography, drama, and social commentary – meditates deeply
1
l e o n a r d c as s u to a n d c l a r e v i r g i n i a e b y
on consumerism, gender divisions, and the workings of class and power, to
name a few of his preoccupations.
Readers of Dreiser must first confront his style, which is as distinctive
as a signature. Dreiser relies on the accretion of concrete details, creating a unique sort of narrative momentum that is authoritative yet often disconcerting. A reviewer of a late novel described “the labor of reading him”
as “profitable” yet at the same time bringing with it a “sense of grinding
despair.”4 But to invoke one of Dreiser’s favorite words, the “force” of his
writing cannot be denied. The enormous accumulation of physical detail
makes Dreiser’s work into a kind of verbal kaleidescope, reflecting and re-
fracting the changing world around him as he seeks to capture it in words.
As Paul Giles observes in this volume, the relation between words and things
can be problematic in Dreiser’s work, as his stories “represent the shapeless-
ness of life” in an aesthetic that is both documentary and artfully shaped.
Dreiser, who claimed in an early literary manifesto that “True Art Speaks
Plainly,” sought his truth in the details, presenting facts “with a bitter, brutal insistence on their so-ness.”5
The poet William Carlos Williams famously declared, “No ideas but in
things.”6 Though his austere poetic style could not be more different from
Dreiser’s deliberate amassing of details, Williams could have been talking
about Dreiser’s work. Dreiser’s attention to things – what we today call
“material culture” – mirrors and conveys his interest in the industrialized
American milieu. People and things exist in a dense web of connection in
Dreiser’s world. His descriptions build upon one another in massive waves
of cataloguing detail, and the objects he describes so thoroughly and care-
fully relate intimately to the identities of the people who see and own them;
in Dreiser’s world, people and things give meaning to each other. In “The
matter of Dreiser’s modernity,” Bill Brown examines the author’s signature
obsession with material things and how things effect consciousness – in other
words, the interaction between “flesh” and “spirit,” the key terms in Dreiser’s original working title for his first novel, Sister Carrie (1900).
Dreiser’s interest in things proceeds from life during a time when the United
States began mass-producing them. He came of age as a novelist in an in-
dustrializing country which was growing and producing material goods in
quantities, varieties, and speeds never before seen. Efficient large-scale man-
ufacturing – that is, mass production – became possible in America only
after the Civil War. Continually operating machines and plants were intro-
duced, through which raw materials proceeded, worked over in a number
of well-choreographed stages to emerge as finished products. These innova-
tions contributed to the production of standardized goods at lower costs and
higher profits. The development of electricity in the 1880s provided a more
2
Introduction
stable and flexible power source for factories, and the capstone on mass pro-
duction during Dreiser’s lifetime was placed by Henry Ford, whose Highland
Park plant introduced the moving assembly line beginning in 1913.7
These industrial shifts were part of wholesale changes in the United States.
Between 1890 and 1910, the country’s population increased fifty percent,
partially from adding thirteen million new immigrants. The western frontier
closed, and the United States became a colonial power. Nationwide corpora-
tions and monopolistic trusts loomed over the economic landscape, and the
national government became more active to check their power. These great
corporations, led by titanic industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew
Carnegie, and Charles Tyson Yerkes (the model for Dreiser’s financier Frank
Cowperwood), created great fortunes, widening the gap between the rich
and the poor and creating a new bureaucratic hierarchy which gave busi-
ness its recognizably modern form. Now there was a pyramid of lower-level
employees beneath every mogul – which challenged older American doc-
trines extolling self-reliant and self-made men. The number of urban pop-
ulations over one hundred thousand doubled, and the number of married
women in the work force quadrupled. The United States became less rural,
less agricultural, less ethnically homogenous, and less divided into distinct
male and female spheres of work – all the while growing more imperialis-
tic, more industrial, and more racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. At the same time, people were being brought together by a thickening web of
railroads (along with the new standardized time zones introduced to coor-
dinate railway schedules), and by the distance-collapsing invention of the
telephone. A revolution in mass communication had also begun: new pub-
lishing technology made books more affordable; newspapers grew in size,
circulation, and influence; and motion pictures became widely available. By
1920, the United States had become an industrial powerhouse, with grow-
ing cities teeming with factory labor: not only recently arrived immigrants,
but also people like Roberta Alden in An American Tragedy (1925), who
leaves the family farm in search of greater opportunity. Department stores
and mail-order catalogues appeared, two new mass retail methods offering
an unprecedented array of goods. In Thorstein Veblen’s memorable phrase,
“conspicuous consumption” became a national pastime. To stoke consumer
desire further, advertising outlays increased tenfold to 500 million dollars
between 1867 and 1900.8
Today’s reader may encounter Dreiser with an eerie familiarity, for he was
portraying the United States in the process of changing into a modern con-
sumerist society we can still easily recognize. Dreiser’s vivid portrait in Sister Carrie of his heroine looking with amazement and longing at the bedecked city shop windows captures the moment of creation of new desires for a new
3
l e o n a r d c as s u to a n d c l a r e v i r g i n i a e b y
abundance of commodities. Similarly, Clyde Griffiths’s longing gazes upon
his relatives’ mansion on a hill in An American Tragedy typify the growing distance between the haves and the have-nots. These and other Dreiser
characters would be completely at home with late twentieth-century life as
it is captured in conceptual artist Barbara Kruger’s photographic collages.
Influenced by advertising’s graphic style of persuasion, Kruger’s image of two