dent interested in Dreiser’s complex realism, for example, might begin with
the essays by Lears, Riggio, and Giles before proceeding to Orvell and Eby.
Dreiser’s interest in class structure and social mobility is exemplified by
his famous account in The Financier of young Frank Cowperwood watching a lobster and a squid in a tank. As the lobster reduces the squid bit by bit
to its inevitable end, Cowperwood realizes that so it is also in the human
world: the strong live off the weak. This conflict was one of Dreiser’s deepest and most persistent themes, and it may be traced in this collection through
the essays by West (who examines Dreiser’s own struggles), Riggio, Lears,
Brown, Jurca, Orvell, Robbins, and Cassuto.
In the minds of Dreiser and many of his contemporaries, evolutionary
thinking – particularly the emphasis in Social Darwinism on human fitness
for existence – provided a powerful way to conceptualize social organiza-
tion. The complicated web of ideas associated with evolutionary thinking,
which lies at the center of the traditional understanding of American liter-
ary naturalism, is here examined by Wald and Gair. Social Darwinians were
obsessed by racial and ethnic differences, topics also considered by Wald and
Gair, as well as Giles.
Gender, sex, and sexuality occupied Dreiser for his whole life and his
thinking about these subjects found its way into virtually all of his work.
Jurca, Wald, Robbins, Eby, and Cassuto focus in various ways on this linked
group of Dreiserian themes. If Dreiser treated these ideas with a realism that
could be harsh in its depiction of destructive social and biological forces, he also showed a sentimentality that frustrated some of his critics, but which
also gives his work what his contemporary Sherwood Anderson called “real
tenderness.”16 For different assessments of Dreiser’s sentimentalism, the
reader is invited to visit the essays by Giles, Jurca, and Cassuto.
Finally, we offer directions for those interested in specific novels. Sister Carrie receives the most attention from contributors; it’s considered in the essays by Riggio, Giles, Lears, Jurca, Gair, Wald, and Eby. Jennie Gerhardt, Dreiser’s second novel, receives attention from Giles, Lears, Jurca, and Eby.
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Introduction
The Trilogy of Desire, made up of The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic, gets its due from Lears, Riggio, Orvell, Robbins, and Eby, while The
“Genius” is a subject for Giles, Lears, Brown, Orvell, and Eby.
An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s masterpiece, is spotlighted by Giles, Lears, Eby, and Cassuto. And The Bulwark (1946) receives attention from Brown
and Riggio. Dreiser is remembered primarily for his fiction, but many con-
tributors draw also on his non-fiction and journalism to ground their analysis
in thinking about Dreiser, his writing, and his time.
That intersection of the author, his work, and his time is the main focus of
this volume. The last word here belongs to H. L. Mencken, who understood
Dreiser, his writing, and his time as well as any reader ever has. Mencken
dropped his customary shield of irony to eulogize his friend in 1947. Of
Dreiser he wrote: “No other American of his generation left so wide and
handsome a mark upon the national letters. American writing, before and
after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin . . .
All of us who write are better off because he lived, worked, and hoped.”17
N O T E S
1 Sinclair Lewis, “The American Fear of Literature,” 1930; reprinted in The Man From Main Street. Selected Essays and Other Writings: 1904–1950, eds. Harry E.
Maule and Melville H. Cane (New York: Pocket Books, 1963), pp. 7–8.
2 Lewis acted decidedly less warmly toward Dreiser the next year, accusing Dreiser of plagiarizing a book on Russia by Lewis’s wife, Dorothy Thompson. Dreiser
angrily denied the charge, and the disagreement boiled over when Dreiser slapped Lewis at a dinner party in March 1931. The most thorough account of this incident is to be found in W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), pp. 372–373.
3 The University of Pennsylvania Press began publishing the Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition with Sister Carrie in 1981. The series, its title now streamlined to the Dreiser Edition, is currently being published by the University of Illinois Press. The Dreiser Editions are typically longer and more sexually explicit than the versions initially published during the author’s lifetime; they also reflect his thinking earlier in the compositional process. When two versions of a given Dreiser text exist, each is valuable and, in its own way, authoritative.
4 T. K. Whipple, “Theodore Dreiser: An American Tragedy,” 1926; reprinted in Critical Essays on Theodore Dreiser, ed. Donald Pizer (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1981), p. 253.
5 Theodore Dreiser, “True Art Speaks Plainly,” 1903; reprinted in Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George J. Becker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 155–156; Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” , 1915 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), p. 231.
6 William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1946–58), Book i, line 14.
7 See Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977).
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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
8 See Chandler; Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973, pp. 89–166, esp. 146); Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal
History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 1–30; Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores 1890–1940 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; reprinted, New York: Modern Library, 1934), esp. chapter iv.
9 Barbara Kruger, “Untitled” (1982). Dreiser’s characters listen to the “voice of the so-called inanimate,” particularly when it comes to fashion. See Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer. Norton Critical Edition; 2nd edn. (New York: Norton, 1991),
p. 75.
10 Sex and the City, “What Goes Around Comes Around” (HBO, first aired
8 October 2000). Written by Darren Star. Directed by Allen Coulter.
11 Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1877–1879; reprint, New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 135.
12 The preliminary list of petition signers is reprinted in the Dreiser–Mencken Letters: The Correspondence of Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, 1907–
1945, ed. Thomas P. Riggio, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 802–804.
13 Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days, ed. T. D. Nostwich (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 77, 461.
14 The literary critic Malcolm Cowley once described Dreiser’s mind as being “like an attic in an earthquake, full of big trunks that slithered about and popped open one after another, so that he sometimes spoke as a Social Darwinist, sometimes
as almost a fascist, sometimes as a sentimental reformer” ( The Dream of Golden Mountains [New York: Penguin, 1981], p. 59).
15 Theodore Dreiser to H. L. Mencken, 27 March 1943. Dreiser–Mencken Letters, ed. Riggio, vol. 2, p. 689.
16 Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908–1945 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1990), p. 343.
17 Reprinted in Riggio, ed., Dreiser–Mencken Letters, vol. 2, p. 805.
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1
J A M E S L . W. W E S T I I I
Dreiser and the profession of authorship
In October 1910 Theodore Dreiser decided, for the third time in his life, to
make a try at professional authorship. He had already attempted full-time
writing twice, once as a newspaper reporter from 1892 to 1895 and a second
time as a freelance magazine writer from 1897 to 1900. Both times Dreiser
had found it necessary to abandon authorship and move into magazine edit-
ing in order to support himself. Now, in the fall of 1910, he meant to try
authorship again – this time as a writer of fiction.
Dreiser had no immediate reason to change occupations. He was well
established as the editor of several large-circulation magazines issued by
Butterick Publications and was married, rather conventionally, to a pleasant
and affectionate woman. He had recently turned thirty-nine, had money in
the bank, and was living in a comfortable flat in New York City. It is true that he had become entangled in an office romance with a woman too young for
him, but he could probably have smoothed over that matter and continued
to work at Butterick if he had wished to. He could also have left Butterick
and sought editorial work elsewhere in the city. Instead he chose to resign
from his post and begin writing fiction for a living. From a practical point
of view his decision is hard to explain; sitting on his side of the desk, the
editor’s side, he must have been reminded frequently of how precarious the