worst features of naked capitalism.
There were positives, however. Dreiser was aware that he would probably
find chances to recycle his writings – to publish them repeatedly for extra in-
come after their first appearances in print. What all authors needed, he knew,
was continuing money from republication of earlier writings, or from sale
of subsidiary rights to those works. A freshly composed item of literature –
an essay, poem, short story, or novel – could therefore function like a long-
term investment. It would yield first returns from initial publication, but it
might also be made to pay dividends over the years that followed.
There were opportunities for such recycling in Dreiser’s time, though not
as many as there are today. The most common methods of republication now
are paperbacks and book clubs, but neither existed for Dreiser in 1910. Book
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Dreiser and the profession of authorship
clubs would not arrive on the literary scene until 1926, when both Book-of-
the-Month Club and Literary Guild were founded, and modern paperback
houses did not begin to operate in the United States until 1939, when Pocket
Books issued its first titles.8 Popular novels and other strong-selling books
were reissued during most of Dreiser’s career only by hardback reprinters
such as Grosset and Dunlap, A. L. Burt, the Modern Library, Sun Dial Books,
and Blue Ribbon Books. These operations leased the printing plates from the
originating publishers and manufactured long printing runs on cheap paper,
then sold the books at cut rates in drug stores, newsstands, and department
stores. Authors made very little from such rights, partly because the reprinters paid only small fixed fees in advance and partly because these reprint houses
were not especially good at distributing their books. These houses, however,
were all that was available, and Dreiser did benefit from them, bringing in
some income over the course of his career by leasing rights for his more
popular novels and story collections to Grosset and Dunlap, A. L. Burt,
Garden City Publishing, and the Modern Library.
Dreiser never benefitted while alive from either book-club or paperback
publication. His novel The Bulwark, issued in 1946, the year after his death, was the first of his writings to be chosen by a book club. It was a selection
of the Book Find Club; one can still find copies of this edition today in used
book stores and at rummage sales. As for paperbacks, Sister Carrie (in an abridged text) was published in soft covers by Pocket Books in 1949, and
An American Tragedy (also abridged) was issued in wrappers that same year by New American Library. These were the first paperback publications of
books by Dreiser. The proceeds, however, went to his heirs, not to him.
A better possibility for Dreiser was magazine serialization. It was com-
mon practice during his day for authors to make double income by selling
their novels initially for publication in installments, then collecting money a second time for clothbound publication. The problem for Dreiser was that
much of the subject matter of his novels was blunt and grim – and therefore
unsuitable for the mass-market “slick” magazines, so called because they
were printed on smooth, glossy paper. Dreiser did place a few excerpts from
A Traveler at Forty in Century magazine in the months before the trade volume appeared in November 1913, and he pre-published five episodes from A
Book about Myself in the Bookman in 1921 and 1922. An abridged version of his controversial 1915 novel The “Genius” was printed in Metropolitan Magazine, but that serialization appeared in 1923, eight years after the book had first been published in hard covers. Boni and Liveright was reissuing The “Genius” , which had been suppressed when it first came out, and the shortened text in Metropolitan was meant to persuade readers to buy the full version in cloth. These were Dreiser’s only serializations. He was never
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ja m e s l . w. w e s t i i i
able to exploit the full possibilities of the practice, though he did manage to employ it from time to time to enlarge his income.
The majority of the books that Dreiser issued over the full run of his ca-
reer were collections which included already published writing: volumes of
short stories, plays, poetry, essays, sketches, and journalism. Typically these books were composed of pieces which had already seen print, intermixed
with some new writing. These collections – Plays of the Natural and the
Supernatural (1916), Free and Other Stories (1918), Twelve Men (1919), Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1920), The Color of a Great City (1923), Moods: Cadenced and Declaimed (1926), Chains (1927), Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), and A Gallery of Women (1929) – can thus be seen as regular efforts by Dreiser to make at least some of his writings pay as serialized novels
would, once for periodical publication and a second time for appearance in
book form. Dreiser’s collections can also be regarded as professional neces-
sities: he had to produce shorter pieces steadily throughout his writing life in order to bring in immediate income; he was rarely far enough ahead econom-ically to devote long periods to the composition of novels. The collections
therefore kept his name prominent in the literary reviews and brought in
needed money – but not a great deal, since the sales figures for these books
were usually modest.
Some of Dreiser’s contemporaries – Edith Wharton, for example, and
Richard Harding Davis – benefitted from the sale of the drama rights to
their novels and stories. Stage adaptations earned fresh money, both from
Broadway first runs and from later travelling productions. Dreiser would
do well from stage rights, but only once – when a 1926 dramatic adap-
tation of An American Tragedy was successfully produced in New York.9
Movie rights too began to become an important factor in the literary equa-
tion in the 1920s, and Dreiser, like several other authors of his generation,
did well here. He realized some $80,000 from Paramount for the cinema
rights to An American Tragedy and, for a few years, lived in high style on the money. He lost some of it in the 1929 stock market crash and in the
depression that followed; but Dreiser had been careful, investing portions of
his income in land and in gold, and he avoided the worst financial hardships
of the 1930s.10 Dreiser even managed during the depression to sell Jennie
Gerhardt to Paramount for a 1933 cinema production, and he later mar-
keted his sketch “My Brother Paul” to Twentieth Century-Fox for a 1942
movie based on the life of his brother Paul Dresser. These windfalls of movie
money were welcome, all the more so because Dreiser could not have fore-
seen them when he cast out on his own in 1910.
When Dreiser re-entered the literary profession in that year, he must have
believed that his writings would quickly find a second readership across the
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Dreiser and the profession of authorship
Atlantic and generate advances and royalties from British publishers. Sister Carrie had done so: it had earned good reviews and had brought in a little money from an abridged edition published in London by Heinemann in
1901. Dreiser’s wish for a British audience did not materialize immediately,
however. He flirted in 1912 and 1913 with a London publisher named Grant
Richards, who admired his writings; Richards, though, was flighty and had
already gone through one publishing bankruptcy, so Dreiser held off. He had
to wait until 1926, in the wake of the success of An American Tragedy, to secure a stable British house, Constable, which was willing to issue his works
in series for the British market. Constable did well by Dreiser, publishing his major books during the late 1920s and early 1930s in a “New Uniform
Edition,” then reissuing them in cheap bindings during the late 1930s for
a “Popular Edition.” The returns from these Constable editions, however,
were never especially large.
Today a publishing contract for a novel or a significant work of non-
fiction routinely contains clauses for many types of lucrative “sub-rights,”
as agents call them: not only for paperbacks, book clubs, and stage/cinema
rights, but also for television and radio adaptations, audiotape or compact
disc versions, foreign-language translations, syndications, abridgments, mu-
sical renderings, and even toy, T-shirt, coffee-mug, and video-game rights.
Most of these kinds of literary recycling did not exist in Dreiser’s time. If they did (as with translations), they brought the author little more than pocket
money. Dreiser therefore learned that if he meant to live entirely from his
pen, he would have to produce new work steadily. From the 1910s through
the 1930s he wrote regularly for a great many national outlets, including
McClure’s, Hearst’s, Smart Set, Century, Reedy’s, the Bookman, Shadow-land, the American Mercury, Vanity Fair, and Esquire. He also brought in money by writing for the major daily newspapers in New York, often about
his travels or about the city itself.
Among the major writers of Dreiser’s time, who fared better in the literary