beginning to look at their never-ending dilemma philosophically, match-
ing it up with life around him, its twists and turns of fate that seemed to
order success or failure for no apparent reason. Curiously, indeed almost
perversely in view of his family’s failed dreams, he began to think that life
was more dramatic than any fiction could paint it. He worked on at Hib-
bard, Spencer, Bartlett & Company with no real future in sight until the
summer of 1889, rising six days a week at 5:45 a.m. and getting home at
dusk. The working conditions were marked by poor ventilation, and his
weak lungs were hurting from cleaning out dusty bins. His health, he told
a friend back in Warsaw, was “decidedly” poor.11 Then, reminiscent of Paul’s
jubilant appearances out of nowhere during bleak times, Dreiser relates in
his autobiography that relief and salvation now arrived in the person of Mil-
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
2 9
dred Fielding, his teacher in Warsaw. She had become a principal in one of
Chicago’s outlying high schools, but she had not forgotten the dreamy boy
in Warsaw who so impressed her with his intellectual curiosity and obvi-
ous potential. Hearing that the family had relocated to Chicago, she went
to Flourney Street, where she found Sarah. She had an idea, a plan, that
had perhaps been simmering in her mind since the Warsaw days.
Miss Fielding was prepared to send her former student to college and, as
reported in Dawn, to pay all the expenses. “Now Theodore,” she said to
him after going to the warehouse and drawing him aside, “I have come here
especially to do this, and you must help me. I have the money.” He was to
attend the Indiana State College in Bloomington, her alma mater; she knew
its president personally and would see that Theodore was admitted as a spe-
cial student in spite of the lack of a high school diploma. In the published
autobiography, Dreiser remembers being oªered a “year or two,” but the
manuscript version says “one year,” which is probably right. He wrote in
both the manuscript and the published version that Fielding agreed to pay
the yearly tuition of $200 and provided her scholar with a monthly al-
lowance of $50 for room, board, and all other expenses. This intervention
of an English teacher in the development of literary genius, however, may
be as much romantic fancy and distorted memory as fact. Much earlier than
the composition of his autobiography, he remembered it diªerently. Writ-
ing to a friend in 1901, he said that while working at the hardware store, “I
discovered I could go to college for a year for $200, and made an arrange-
ment with a friend of mine to advance me half of this. The rest I earned
and in 1889 adjourned to Bloomington.”12 Though the friend may well have
been Mildred Fielding and he may have gained admission through her in-
tervention, this is a more mundane rendition. Whatever the case, Sarah ruled
that he could expect no family support for such an enterprise, even though
she must have been delighted that, unlike his siblings, her son was—for a
while at least—finding an intellectual way out of the workaday world.
–
Whenever he reflected on his year at what is now Indiana University, Dreiser
wrote in Dawn, “I have to smile, for aside from the diªering mental and
scenic aspects of the life there as contrasted with what I had left, its tech-
nical educational value to me was zero, or nearly so.” But this is perhaps
best seen as the bitter reflection of one to whom college was barely avail-
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
3 0
able and who, in the end, did not stay. Even though he entered college in
the fall of 1889 as a special student who could have chosen a more flexible
course of study than the degree student’s, he followed the baccalaureate pro-
gram in the selection of his freshman classes. Like the underprivileged Clyde
Gri‹ths of An American Tragedy, who fears that he has no viable future
outside his uncle’s factory and his cousins’ social circle, the underprivileged
Theodore Dreiser seized upon this rare, almost fabulous, opportunity to
rise out of the poverty encircling himself and his sisters and brothers. With
no high school diploma, no money, and no apparent skills, he had been
headed downward, not up; at best, he might have hoped, like his cowork-
ers at the warehouse, to become a traveling salesman. To prepare for this
remarkable change of fortune, he read books— Tom Brown at Rugby, Four
Years at Harvard, and A Collegiate’s Remembrances of Princeton. With a cheap
suit and little else in the way of proper clothing for a college freshman, he
set out for Bloomington that fall.
Indiana University in those days was a far cry from either Rugby or Prince-
ton, or from its status today as a major American university. Its student
body numbered around three hundred (though Dreiser gives a higher num-
ber in his autobiography); the town’s streets were unpaved and muddy; and
the college curriculum still clung to old-fashioned pedagogy over research-
oriented faculty interests. But change had been set in motion with the ap-
pointment of David Starr Jordan as the institution’s president in 1885. Jor-
dan was an eªective lobbyist and fund-raiser who by the end of his first
year in o‹ce had spoken in all ninety-two counties of the state and was
working eªectively with the legislature. By the fall of 1889, when Dreiser
arrived, the “new” campus boasted a library constructed of native limestone
and six or seven buildings (two or three of which still grace the campus).
Jordan had also begun to fill in the ranks of the old guard professors with
promising young faculty members. Himself a specialist in zoology, he first
strengthened the sciences with Charles Henry Gilbert (zoology), John
Casper Branner (geology), Douglas Houghton Campbell (botany), and
Joseph P. Naylor (physics). In the humanities he hired Orrin Benner Clark
(English), Gustaf Karston (romance languages and philology), and Earl
Barnes (history), among others.
But at Indiana, as at most nineteenth-century colleges and universities,
the humanities curriculum consisted almost exclusively of classical languages
and literatures. English courses (but not much literature in English, cer-
tainly no American literature, which wouldn’t reach the American college
curriculum until the 1920s) were usually taught by clergymen professors
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
3 1
who —entrenched in the classics themselves—were less than enthusiastic
and sometimes rigidly supercilious about English as a legitimate academic
subject. At Indiana there was no “Professor of English” per se in the years
following the Civil War but instead pedagogically bloated titles such as “Pro-
fessor of English Literature and Theory and Practice of Teaching” or “Pro-
fessor of Elocution,” reflecting America’s love of oratory in the nineteenth
century. By the time Dreiser became a student, at least the beginnings of
change to more diversified curriculum appeared in the form of Jordan’s new
hire for English, Orrin Benner Clark, who was also secretary of the faculty.
Clark was less than kindly memorialized in Dawn as “Arthur Peddoe Gates,
Litt.D., Ph.D., an osseous, skeleton-like creature, who taught English Lit-
erature, Anglo-Saxon, and the Study of Words. . . . As my father to reli-
gion, so this man to bookish knowledge.”13
Although Clark took a liking to the young student, Dreiser nevertheless
regretted in his later reminiscence that for all the professor’s deep learning
he apparently lacked one important ingredient. “I truly believe this man
toiled by night as well as by day,” he recalled, “trying to extract wisdom and
understanding from his tomes, when the least gift of imagination, the tini-
est spark, would have saved him from years of toil.” Like many of his col-
leagues in this small college atmosphere, Clark gave “literary evenings”;
Dreiser thought the professor read Shakespeare “abominably.” This may be
a judgment he could only make in hindsight, however. Along with many
of his literary contemporaries born in the latter half of the nineteenth cen-
tury (Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland), Dreiser merely dab-
bled in formal learning and put little faith in its mimicry of and obeisance
to the European models of the university. It all smacked of Old World
adoration—garnering, he thought, more quantity than quality of informa-
tion, “stored eventually in the dry, dusty bins of libraries.”14 Certainly the
stubbornly American Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, with their empha-
sis on vernacular and workaday themes, were not held in high regard by
the prevailing literary and academic circles when Dreiser was in college.
At only twenty-two, Clark was hardly older than his student, but he looked
much older—a “tall, frail, graceful . . . willowy, candle-waxy man . . . with