The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser
Contents:
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction
1 Dreiser and the profession of authorship
2 Dreiser and the uses of biography
3 Dreiser’s style
4 Dreiser and the history of American longing
5 The matter of Dreiser’s modernity
6 Dreiser, class, and the home
7 Can there be loyalty in The Financier? Dreiser and upward mobility
8 Dreiser, art, and the museum
9 Dreiser and women
10 Sister Carrie, race, and the World’s Columbian Exposition
11 Dreiser’s sociological vision
12 Dreiser and crime
Select bibliography
N O T E S O N C O N T R I B U T O R S
b i l l b row n is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at The
University of Chicago, where he also serves as a member of the Committee
on the History of Culture, and as a member of the editorial board of
Critical Inquiry. His publications include The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play
(Harvard, 1996), A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American
Literature (Chicago, 2003), two edited volumes, Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Novels (Bedford, 1997), and a special issue of Critical Inquiry on “Things” (Winter, 2001).
l e o n a r d c as s u to is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate
Studies in the English department at Fordham University. He is the author
of The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and
Culture (Columbia University Press, 1997) and many articles about
naturalist authors. He is currently at work on a cultural history of
twentieth-century American crime fiction.
c l a r e v i r g i n i a e b y is Professor of English at the University of
Connecticut. She is the author of Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the
Status Quo and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. She is presently editing the Dreiser Edition of The Genius and writing a biography of Ellen Rolfe Veblen.
c h r i s to p h e r g a i r is a Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies at
the University of Birmingham, England. He is the author of Complicity and
Resistance in Jack London’s Novels: From Naturalism to Nature (1997),
and of numerous articles on American literature and culture in journals
including Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in American Fiction, and Studies in the Novel. He is currently completing a book on representations of
whiteness in early twentieth-century American fiction.
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n o t e s o n c o n t r i b u to rs
pau l g i l e s is Reader in American Literature at the University of Oxford.
He is the author of Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the
Transatlantic Imaginary (2002); Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (2001);
American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (1992); and Hart Crane: The Contexts of The Bridge (1986).
c at h e r i n e j u rc a is Associate Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology. She is the author of White Diaspora: The Suburb
and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton University Press,
2001). Her current project is a book on propaganda, public relations, and
Hollywood film in the forties.
jac k s o n l e a rs was educated at the University of Virginia, the
University of North Carolina, and Yale University, where he received a
Ph.D. in American Studies. He is the author of No Place of Grace:
Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920,
which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981
and Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America,
which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History in 1995. He
has also co-edited two collections of essays, The Culture of Consumption
and The Power of Culture. His new book, Something for Nothing: Luck in America, has just been published by Viking Penguin. He has been a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other
publications. He has taught at Yale University, the University of Missouri,
New York University, and Rutgers University, where he is now Board of
Governors Professor of History and editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review.
He lives in western New Jersey with his wife, the artist Karen Parker Lears,
and their two daughters.
m i l e s o rv e l l is Professor of English and American Studies at Temple
University, and Director of American Studies there. He is the author of The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940,
of After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries, and of American Photography (in the Oxford History of Art Series). He is also the Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online.
His current research is on museums.
t h o m as p. r i g g i o is Professor of English at the University of
Connecticut and General Editor of the Dreiser Edition.
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n o t e s o n c o n t r i b u to rs
b ru c e ro b b i n s teaches in the Department of English and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University. His most recent book is Feeling Global:
Internationalism in Distress (New York University Press, 1999). This essay is part of a work-in-progress on upward mobility stories.
p r i s c i l l a wa l d is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies
at Duke University. She is Associate Editor of American Literature and an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Medical Ethics and Humanities and
the Center for Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy. She teaches and writes
about American literature and culture with a concentration on ethnicity,
science, law, and medicine. She is the author of Constituting Americans:
Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Duke University Press, 1995), a
study of legal, political, and literary representation in the nineteenth-
century United States. She is currently working on two book-length
projects. The first, “Cultures and Carriers: From ‘Typhoid Mary’ to
‘Patient Zero,’” explores the conceptual connections between theories of
culture and contagion at the turn of the twentieth century and the social
transformations and legal conflicts introduced by bacteriology and
virology. The second, “Clones, Chimeras and Other Creatures of the
Biological Revolution: Essays on Genetics and Popular Culture,”
investigates the cultural narratives that inform popular understanding of
genetics and their impact on bioethical discussions.
ja m e s l . w. w e s t is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at
Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of American Authors and
the Literary Marketplace (1988) and of William Styron, A Life (1998).
West has edited scholarly editions of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, and he is general editor of the Cambridge edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
All books are collaborations, but none more than edited collections. Accord-
ingly, we’d like to begin by thanking our contributors for cheerfully meeting
deadlines with work that we’ve enjoyed and learned from. Of the contribu-
tors, we are especially grateful to Tom Riggio for his advice along the way.
Thanks also to Robert S. Levine for giving direction to this book at the out-
set, and to Ray Ryan for shepherding it through stages of development and
production with insight and efficiency.
Finally, the editors would like to acknowledge the work of Philip Gerber,
at whose conference on Dreiser we met in 1990. People in the field know
how Phil’s scholarship has enriched Dreiser studies, but his support of young
scholars is what we’ll always remember. Here’s to you, Phil.
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C H R O N O L O G Y
1871
Herman Theodore Dreiser (TD hereafter) is born in Terre
Haute, Indiana, the ninth of ten surviving children born to
Sarah Sch än äb Dreiser and Johann Paul Dreiser. His father
had emigrated from Germany in 1844 and had been
proprietor of a wool mill until he lost his trade to a fire
and disabling accident. His mother was of Pennsylvania
Mennonite descent. During the seven years TD lived in
Terre Haute, the impoverished family would occupy five
different houses.
1877
At age six, TD goes to Catholic school, which he would
attend intermittently for several years.
1879
To economize, Sarah Dreiser moves to Vincennes, Indiana
to live with a friend, taking with her the three youngest
children, including TD. Four children remain in Terre
Haute, working to help support the family, along with TD’s
father, now working as a foreman. Three children disperse.
1879
After discovering her friend is running a bordello, Sarah