inducted into this army of toilers, if only until the train reached its final
destination. With only a few dollars and one bag containing “a single change
of underwear and socks,” his own prospects in Chicago seemed limited. Yet
as he stepped oª the train, the gritty grandness of the city beckoned. “In
me are all the pulses and wonders and tastes and loves of life itself !” he re-
membered in Dawn. “I am life! This is paradise!”3
“Paradise” soon consisted of a dollar-fifty-a-week front bedroom in a
rooming house on West Madison Street, not far from where the family had
lived in Chicago years before, and a job as a dishwasher at five dollars a
week in a nearby Greek restaurant run by one John Paradiso. The neigh-
borhood around it at Halstead Street near Van Buren pulsated with life—
though there were also the lifeless, left lingering in its streets and alleys.
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
2 6
Dreiser was fascinated with its vitality and variety—its street markets and
streetwalkers, its shoppers and malingerers side by side in the surge of big
city life. The unglamorous little restaurant in which he worked three meals
a day, seven days a week, was dirty and “fly-specked,” with low ceilings and
three rows of tables lining a rectangular room. Although his sisters Theresa
and Mame and his brother Al were already sharing an apartment in
Chicago, Dreiser—who liked his brothers and sisters “fairly well according
to their merits as individuals, but never more so”—was determined, at least
at first, to make it on his own, even in the heat of July in a smoky kitchen.4
One day in August, however, Theo finally decided to pay a visit to his
siblings. He found only Theresa at home; Al was temporarily working in
Milwaukee, and Mame, who had taken up with a man named Austin Bren-
nan and was now supposedly married to him, was away for the summer.
Theresa herself indicated she felt like visiting her mother in Warsaw—but
at that moment Sarah, along with what grown children still clung to her
for emotional support, was probably already on her way to Chicago. By
September most of the Dreiser clan, including Theo and John Paul, had
assembled in multiple rooms on Ogden Avenue near Robey Street.
Young Dreiser, now turning seventeen, was embarrassed to tell his fam-
ily that he worked in a lowly Greek restaurant washing dishes, so he told
them he was employed in a fashionable haberdasher’s shop on Halstead
Street that (like the restaurant) was open on Sundays.5 Eventually, he quit
that job for one with an enterprise that cleaned and repaired stoves. The
work was hard and dirty and required heavy lifting; he lasted only one day.
Next he worked briefly for Ed Davis, a “literary-minded” painter of back-
ground scenery for photographers—and the beau of his sister Theresa. This
job didn’t last long either (mainly because Theo talked too much; his more
stolid brother Ed replaced him), but recognizing his interest in books, Davis
recommended Christopher Marlowe and Walt Whitman, two writers
Dreiser admitted he came to appreciate only “years later.”6
Al, who had returned to Chicago to join the family, but lost the job he
had found in a hardware store, was also looking for work at this time, and
the two Dreiser boys made the rounds of the unemployed together. This
search brought into focus for Dreiser “that keen appreciation of the storms
and stress of life that later may have manifested itself in my writings. . . .
For so often I was touched by the figures of other seekers like myself and
Al—their eyes, worn faces, bodies, clothes, the weariness of them in line
at so many doors!”7 In October of 1887 another brother came to Dreiser’s
assistance—not the noble Paul, but the shiftless Rome. Through his rail-
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
2 7
road connections, Rome managed to get his younger brother a job as a car
tracer at a whopping forty-five dollars a month. Although Dreiser got sick
and lost the job after two days, on the first day he got a taste of his brother’s
class anger—and self-defeating ways. Escorting Theo to hunt down a car
far out, Rome insisted on stopping for a morning whiskey. Later, on the
train en route to their destination, he complained of the rich—the Armours,
Swifts, and Pullmans—who were fast piling up gigantic fortunes while
“other men toiled at the bottom for their ‘sissy sons and daughters.’” As
they rode along, Rome furtively jabbed away at the car’s velvet upholstery
with a small pen knife.8
By late in the year, Dreiser had found a job in the shipping department
of an enormous wholesale hardware concern, Hibbard, Spencer, Bartlett &
Company, located on the Chicago River. (It was also around this time that
the family moved to cheaper quarters at 61 Flourney Street.) At the ware-
house he learned of industrial spies and met fellow “box rustlers” who hoped
to be elevated to traveling salesmen for the firm. He also saw some of those
“sissy” rich boys Rome spoke of, sons of the owners, graduates of colleges
that “Dorse” (Dreiser’s family nickname of the moment) had scarcely heard
of, come in “from the east somewhere” to learn the business from the top
down. But the biggest impression on this future chronicler of the contrasts
between rich and poor was made by Christian Aaberg. This Danish im-
migrant was a womanizer, a broken-down drunk, and a philosopher, kept
on at the warehouse at the suªerance of one of the owners. “My Gott, how
I have lived!” he regularly exclaimed to his young new friend. “My Gott,
how drunk I was yesterday! Oh, these women! These devils of women!”
Aaberg spoke to him of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Goethe, among others,
while they loaded boxes, stacked pots and pans “or buckets or bolts or riv-
ets.” He was also among the first to weaken Dreiser’s Catholic faith, even
suggesting that the crucifix was originally a phallic symbol. He spoke to
Theo by the hour of history recorded, Dreiser remembered, not in “the silly,
glossed, emasculated data of the school libraries . . . but [in] the harsh,
jagged realities and savageries of the too real world.” Aaberg also brought
home to Dreiser the European notion that the mind alone made up the es-
sential diªerence “between the masses and the classes.”9
“Working Chicago,” with its hardy diversity and colorful street scenes,
inspired poetry, Dreiser thought—even though this high school drop-out
preferred art galleries to libraries during his oª hours and free Sundays.
Dreiser was “burning with desire” to go ahead in the world, and about him
at this very time—“as luck would have it”—was the great metropolis of
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
2 8
Chicago. By 1889 preparations were underway for the city’s world’s fair to
celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the New
World. When the celebration, which held up grand visions of the coming
twentieth century, arrived a year late in 1893, the excitement was such that
no one seemed to notice. At the same time John D. Rockefeller was turn-
ing a small Baptist school into the University of Chicago, and Yerkes was
taking his streetcar lines to the West and North sides. The young Dreiser
was not alone in imagining that one—almost anyone—could actually rise
and take part of this material splendor, if only he were good enough or
smart enough.
Yet for Dreiser, the most poetic sight remained that of his mother, now
in her mid-fifties— overweight and graying—and long divested of “the del-
icacy of her youth.” To her son, however, her soul shone through as sweetly
as “any girl’s.” Dressed in her modified “Moravian habit of black, with the
nun-like collar,” she moved from the dark of early morning to the dark of
night about their rented rooms performing her “servant-like labors.” The
character of “Sister” Sarah would contribute to the portrait of “Sister Car-
rie,” the girl next door whose innocence is lost in the crush of the mun-
dane. Carrie never stops dreaming of a better life even when down, but
Sarah’s hopes for a “superior home” were fading away by this time. To some
extent, despite the sympathy he could feel for him, Dreiser blamed his fa-
ther. “I can see him now,” he bitterly recalled, “in his worn-out clothes, a
derby or soft hat pulled low over his eyes, his shoes oiled (not shined) in
order to make them wear longer, . . . trudging oª at seven or eight every
morning, rain or shine, to his beloved mass.”10 He took to religion, his son
thought, the way others took to drink or drugs.
Even as he felt sadness at his parents’ plight, their brightest son was also