century, suggesting that his criminal desires result, in effect, from wanting to be a powerful man but not knowing how. For Dreiser, individual transgression could never be severed from a larger analysis of power: social, sexual,
religious, political. This broadly based cultural perspective, which antici-
pates what today’s critics describe as the social construction of desire, forms part of Dreiser’s singular approach.
It was an approach developed and honed during one of America’s more
interesting and varied literary lives. Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre
Haute, Indiana, the ninth of ten surviving children of a poor Catholic family
which fragmented during his childhood for lack of money. Except for a year
of college in Bloomington, Dreiser left Indiana for good in 1887. He moved
to Chicago, and landed his first writing job there in 1892, reporting for the
Chicago Globe.
Dreiser wrote for newspapers for the rest of the decade. In the late 1890s he
also took up short fiction, publishing a handful of short stories in the popular press. He began writing Sister Carrie in 1899. Heavily edited for length and sexual explicitness by his wife, Sara White Dreiser, and friend Arthur
Henry, the manuscript was acquired by Doubleday, Page and Company on
the strength of a recommendation by the novelist Frank Norris, who read
the novel for the publishing house. After offering Dreiser a contract, the firm got cold feet and tried to pull out – but Dreiser held them to their agreement.
So the publisher issued Sister Carrie in 1900 but refused to publicize it, and the novel soon faded from view.
The commercial failure of Sister Carrie devastated Dreiser, whose feeling of betrayal by his publisher turned into depression and contributed to a nervous
breakdown that he describes in the posthumously published autobiography
An Amateur Laborer (1983), with a fictionalized version also appearing
in The “Genius” . After recovering, he returned to journalism, editing The Delineator, a magazine published by the Butterick company. Sister Carrie was reissued in 1907, but Dreiser stayed in the magazine trade until 1910,
when he cut his ties to both his wife and his job, committing himself to sexual adventurism and full-time writing, respectively.
The 1910s were the most prolific period of Dreiser’s writing career. Bottled
up for a decade, his fiction issued forth in torrents. Jennie Gerhardt (which Dreiser had begun in 1901) was published in 1911, The Financier (the first 7
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
volume of the Trilogy of Desire) in 1912, its sequel The Titan in 1914, and The “Genius” in 1915. After the latter novel was suppressed, Dreiser turned to drama and autobiographical writing, publishing Plays of the Natural and
Supernatural (1916), and A Hoosier Holiday (1916) about an automobile trip back to Indiana. Other non-fiction closed the decade: Twelve Men, a series of biographical sketches published in 1919, and Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub, a
collection of essays which appeared in 1920. By then, Dreiser was seen as
one of the leading writers in the United States.
In 1922 Dreiser’s important autobiography of his journalistic apprentice-
ship appeared under the title A Book About Myself (reissued in 1931 as
Newspaper Days). Early in the decade the author was mainly preoccupied
with researching and then writing his most ambitious novel, An American
Tragedy. This wide-scale fictional account of the life of a murderer is Dreiser’s longest book, and also his most acclaimed. It received enthusiastic reviews,
and secured his position in the first rank of American writers. In the glow
of his triumph, he took a Soviet government-paid trip to Russia and pub-
lished the travel narrative Dreiser Looks at Russia in 1928. This trip began a period of more overt political involvement for Dreiser, whose unsystematic
and often contradictory leanings could not easily be housed in any political
party or school of thought; his 1932 overtures to the Communist Party were
consequently rebuffed.14
The year 1931 saw the publication of Dawn, the autobiography of Dreiser’s earliest years and one of his most personal books, as well as a decidedly
public book, Tragic America, which expresses faith in socialism. In very different ways, both show Dreiser’s continuing interest in issues of class,
wealth, and poverty. Dreiser continued work through the 1930s on two
novels, The Bulwark and The Stoic (the latter being the final installment of The Trilogy of Desire). He would labor intermittently on these books for the rest of his life; both were published posthumously. In 1941, on the
eve of America’s entry into World War II, Dreiser published the isolationist
argument America is Worth Saving. After the United States entered the war, Dreiser was accused of siding with Germany, a false accusation trumpeted
both in the United States and abroad. Dreiser lived to see the end of the
war, dying at the end of 1945. One of his last acts was to apply again –
successfully this time – to join the Communist Party. His motivation, he
confided to Mencken, came from his sympathy for the laboring classes. “I
am biased,” he wrote. “I was born poor.”15
Dreiser spent his entire writing career trying to understand “how life is or-
ganized.” We would like to explain here how this volume is organized. The
first part, “Backgrounds and contexts,” collects four widely angled essays
8
Introduction
that together introduce salient aspects of Dreiser’s life, career, writing style, and main concerns. In “Dreiser and the profession of authorship,” James
West outlines Dreiser’s personal and social challenges to establish himself
as a professional author in the literary marketplace at the turn of the cen-
tury. Thomas Riggio offers a biographical perspective on the creative process
in “Dreiser and the uses of biography,” showing how he moved from the
journalistic profiles of successful individuals to fully realized portrayals of American ambition. In “Dreiser’s style,” Paul Giles assesses debates over
the author’s supposed “artlessness” and the journalistic roots of his writing.
Finally, Jackson Lears surveys Dreiser’s fiction panoptically in “Dreiser and
the history of American longing,” braiding together the plots and main char-
acters of Dreiser’s major novels into one long unfolding story of desire. Taken together, these four essays offer a broad entryway into Dreiser’s world.
The remaining seven essays form Part II, “Dreiser and his culture.” These
selections focus on more specific issues. Bill Brown spotlights material
culture; in “The matter of Dreiser’s modernity,” he explores the complex
connection in Sister Carrie and The “Genius” between people and things.
In “Dreiser, class, and the home,” Catherine Jurca shifts attention from the
familiar topics of desire and longing in Dreiser to look at their opposites:
indifference and ennui, typified by the estrangement from the middle-class
symbols of home and family. Miles Orvell’s “Dreiser, art, and the museum”
examines how Dreiser’s experiences and world view – exemplified by the
characters of the financier Frank Cowperwood and the artist Eugene Witla –
place him at the nexus of art and business. Bruce Robbins considers Dreiser’s
view of the evolving relation between loyalty and business during the indus-
trialization of the United States. Frank Cowperwood’s ascent, says Robbins,
reflects the important shift from individual to corporate accountability in
America. Observing the central role that women play in his life and work,
Clare Eby examines Dreiser’s investment in gender stereotypes by focusing
on the powers he attributes to women in a range of his work.
The final essays provide original frameworks for reconsidering Dreiser’s
most familiar novels. Against the contextual backdrop of the ethnological
displays of the White City of the World’s Columbian Exposition – the 1893
World’s Fair that Dreiser visited in Chicago – Christopher Gair argues for a
“racial unconscious” in Sister Carrie: Carrie’s rise and Hurstwood’s decline are marked by their assuming, respectively, the stereotypical characteristics
of whiteness and blackness. Priscilla Wald also shows how Dreiser’s work
fits within prevailing racial ideology; in “Dreiser’s sociological vision,” she brings Sister Carrie into dialogue with the writings of the Chicago sociologists who invented the field. Focusing on the turn-of-the-century character
types of the fallen woman and the New Woman, Wald shows how Dreiser
9
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works with master narratives within the currents of culture. On the other
side of the gender continuum, Leonard Cassuto examines Clyde Griffiths’s
criminal motivations in An American Tragedy in relation to the sentimentalism associated with the nineteenth century. Cassuto argues that Clyde may
be understood as a sentimental man at a time when sentimentalism is giving
way to a more rugged new model of masculinity that would eventually find
its apotheosis in the hard-boiled attitude that emerged in crime fiction during the 1920s.
In the remainder of this introduction, we offer a series of road maps
through this collection of perspectives on Dreiser’s life and work. The stu-