empty gloves that seem to be holding hands – over which she superimposes
the legend, “You are seduced by the sex appeal of the inorganic” – could
be a page torn from a Dreiser novel.9 And more than a hundred years after
having Carrie Meeber imagine in Sister Carrie that her shoes were talking to her, Dreiser would have understood why Carrie Bradshaw, the heroine of
the television comedy Sex and the City, would ignore the theft of her wallet and instead complain about losing her name-brand sandals in a mugging.10
A century after depicting his own Carrie leading a scandalous life as a fallen
woman, Dreiser would also have understood the ceaseless questing for sat-
isfaction, sexual and otherwise, that drives the lives of the characters in Sex and the City. By animating his own time, Dreiser continues to comment on our own.
Dreiser was not the first novelist to tap into consumerist civilization and
its discontents, but his exploration of them may have been the deepest. His
concern with material culture was so far ahead of its time that today’s practi-
tioners of American studies are only starting to catch up with him. In effect,
Dreiser was performing his own cultural studies long before the practice
had a name. His books stand together as a gigantic textbook of modern
American life, shedding light on everything from fin-de-siècle urbanization
to contemporary advertising.
For Dreiser, life in this new world was all about running after one’s wants,
and it amounted to a constant, never-fulfilled pursuit. “Man and beast part
company,” wrote social reformer Henry George in 1879, “in that man alone
feels an infinite progression of desire . . . As power to gratify his wants
increases, so does aspiration grow.”11 Such inchoate, never-ceasing want
forms the blueprint for virtually all of Dreiser’s fiction. As Jackson Lears
argues here, Dreiser saw the unfolding of human existence as a story of
erotic and emotional longing. Driven by their desires, people chase them
until they die. The most powerful such desire, Dreiser believed, was sexual –
and Dreiser’s work merits our attention today for his contradictory but often
visionary thinking about gender and sexuality. In his first and best-known
novel, Sister Carrie, Dreiser broke with longstanding literary tradition by allowing a “fallen woman” to survive and even to prosper as a financially
successful sex symbol and celebrated actress. Priscilla Wald shows in her
essay here how Dreiser’s subversive treatment of the fallen woman narrative
4
Introduction
may be implicated with the newly emergent discipline of sociology and its
concrete, empirical approach. (It is no small measure of the novel’s perennial
appeal that Carrie’s career still charts a viable option for women in the Amer-
ican workplace.) If Dreiser’s women were unusual in their depth and unex-
pected strength – as detailed here by Clare Eby in “Dreiser and women” – the
author’s portrayals of masculinity are just as probing, ranging from George
Hurstwood of Sister Carrie, Lester Kane of Jennie Gerhardt (1911), Eugene Witla in The “Genius” (1915), Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy, to his self-portrayals in Dawn (1931) and other autobiographies. Throughout his fiction and non-fiction, Dreiser examines sex and gender not only in relation to morals and mores, but also in terms of the mysteries of biological,
psychological, and social desire. Appropriately, he titled his three volumes
about a financial tycoon The Trilogy of Desire (1912, 1914, 1947).
At a time when this intersection of sexuality with society receives
increasing attention, Dreiser’s work is emerging as a locus classicus. His commitment to speaking frankly about sexual urges – a topic he believed
a hypocritical and puritanical America sought to smother – provoked at-
tempts at censorship and suppression of his works. When Dreiser’s most
directly autobiographical novel, The “Genius” , was published in 1915, it immediately drew attention for its sexual frankness. In 1916, the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice succeeded in forcing the publisher, John
Lane, to withdraw the book on the grounds of lewdness, obscenity, and blas-
phemy. Despite his reservations about the literary merit of the novel, Dreiser’s friend and champion H. L. Mencken spearheaded a principled campaign in
its defense – urging artistic freedom and condemning the puritanical mo-
tives of censors. The literary community rallied in Dreiser’s defense, and
Mencken secured 458 writers’ signatures on a protest resolution supported
by the Authors’ League of America.12 The case for the novel went to court in
1918, with Dreiser launching a friendly suit against John Lane for breach of
contract, and the publisher replying that the court must decide if the novel
was obscene before it would resume sales. The court refused to decide the
obscenity charge, and The “Genius” continued to languish (except for a condensed serialized version that appeared in Metropolitan magazine) until a new publisher, Boni and Liveright, reissued it in 1923. Sales were brisk at
that point, and the whole incident made Dreiser into a pivotal figure in the
history of freedom of expression.
Such experiences contributed to Dreiser’s fascination with the relationship
between politics and personality, and he was well aware that those who held
sway in the United States usually came from wealth or acquired it in their
search for power. Dreiser understood the connection among money, power,
and achievement from his own struggles to establish himself professionally
5
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
as a writer; as James L. W. West III details here in “Dreiser and the profession of authorship,” he tried on three separate occasions to become a professional
writer, succeeding for good only on the last attempt, when he was already
middle-aged. Miles Orvell, in “Dreiser, art, and the museum,” describes how
the conflict between artistry and business in Dreiser’s fiction places the author at the center of a continuing tension within American culture.
Dreiser well knew that most people lack access to money and power,
and his writing famously explores the desperation of the poor. He wrote
with feeling about capitalism’s losers, drawing from memories of his own
poverty as both child and adult. In “Dreiser and the uses of biography,”
Thomas Riggio details how the author used his personal experience (and
often that of his family members and friends) to put flesh on his fictional
portraits of people striving in the world. “Always the miseries of the poor . . .
fascinated me,” Dreiser wrote in one of his autobiographies. But he was also
taken by the charisma and longings of the rich and powerful; later in that
same volume he says, “I was . . . tremendously fascinated by the rise of the
various captains of industry.”13 In his discussion of upward mobility in The Financier, Bruce Robbins explores the rules of the game that Dreiser’s robber baron plays so well, suggesting that Frank Cowperwood’s rise may be linked
to the emergence of institutionally based ethics. Sister Carrie juxtaposes the rise of a country girl into a celebrity with the decline of an affluent manager into a homeless bum. From that debut through his final novel, The Stoic
(1947), Dreiser’s works explore people’s struggles to make it in a country
where the downward spiral is at least as common as the mythically resonant
upward ascent. Perhaps better than any other writer, Dreiser understood
riches and poverty as two end panels in the same triptych – and framed in
the center lies the middle class. Many essays in this book touch on Dreiser’s
deep interest in class structure, but Catherine Jurca’s “Dreiser, class, and the home” focuses most closely on the way that Dreiser’s portrayal of extremes
frames a sensitive inquiry into the emotional needs of the middle class. And
as Christopher Gair shows in an innovative reading of Sister Carrie, Dreiser’s characterization of class position is unconsciously engaged with the racial
thinking of his time.
As Dreiser considered class and sexuality among the primary determinants
of American identity, he was especially interested in how the action of the
two together could result in violations of the social order. One of his working titles for Jennie Gerhardt, a novel about the relationship between a rich man and a poor woman, was “The Transgressor.” It is therefore not surprising
that Dreiser’s fascination with the mysteries of human motivation led him to
examine the tangled drives that could lead a citizen to cross the line to be-
come a criminal. His most celebrated novel, An American Tragedy, follows a 6
Introduction
murderer from seedy childhood to flamboyant social success, all the way to
the electric chair. This panoramic story of Clyde Griffiths’s desperate attempt to keep his tenuous gains explores the individual psychology of the criminal –
and more important, the social values that shaped his desires and the justice
system that then punishes them. In “Dreiser and crime,” Leonard Cassuto
reads Clyde in relation to changing models of masculinity at the turn of the