To-day,” Harper’s Weekly 45 (December 14, 1901): 1272–73.
22. “A Master of Photography,” Success 2 ( June 10, 1899): 471; and “The Cam-
era Club of New York,” Ainslee’s 4 (October 1899): 324–35. See also Joseph J.
Kwiat, “Dreiser and the Graphic Artist,” American Quarterly 3 (Summer 1951):
127–41; Kwiat, “Dreiser’s The ‘Genius’ and Everett Shinn, The Ash-Can Painter,”
Publications of the Modern Language Association 67 (March 1952): 15–31; and
FF, 328.
23. DML, 2: 684; and see note 47 to this chapter.
24. Richard Lehan, Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 123–24; Louis J. Oldani, “A Study of
Theodore Dreiser’s The ‘Genius’” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1973),
39; and Oldani, “Dreiser’s ‘Genius’ in the Making: Composition and Revision,”
Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994): 230–52.
25. “Possible Insert” to William C. Lengel’s “A Pregnant Night in American
Literature,” unpublished manuscript, 1960 (Penn); ND, 553; and Sara White
Dreiser to TD, April 19, 1926 (Penn).
26. For the original (happy) ending, see chapter 104 of the manuscript and
chapters 104–5 of the typescript; and The “Genius” (New York: John Lane Com-
pany, 1915), 733.
27. H. L. Mencken, “A Literary Behemoth,” The Smart Set 47 (December
1915): 150–54; reprinted in DML, 2: 754–59.
28. John Cowper Powys, “Theodore Dreiser,” Little Review 2 (November
1915): 7–13, reprinted in TDCR, 226–29; and The “Genius,” 20.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 4 9 – 2 5 7
4 3 9
29. Stuart Sherman, “The Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser,” Nation 101 (Decem-
ber 2, 1915): 648–50, reprinted in Critical Essays on Theodore Dreiser, ed. Don-
ald Pizer (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 4–12.
30. H. L. Mencken, “The Dreiser Bugaboo,” Seven Arts 2 (August 1917),
507–17; reprinted in Critical Essays on Theodore Dreiser, 19–26.
31. Sherman, “Naturalism.”
32. TDCR, 234.
33. TD to Willard Dillman, February 7, 1916 (Virginia); L, 1: 206n.; H. L.
Mencken, My Life As Author and Editor, ed. Jonathan Yardley (New York: Al-
fred A. Knopf, 1993), 153; AD, 132; TDCR, 281–83; and DML, 1: 241.
34. DML, 1: 245n.
35. Cincinnati Enquirer, September 14, 1916 (David Graham Phillips’s posthu-
mously published Susan Lenox was also targeted); “No More Free Ads for Racy
Novels,” New York Tribune, August 20, 1916; and DML, 1: 244.
36. DML, 1: 246, 245–46n; and Oldani, “A Study of The ‘Genius,’” 179–85.
37. William C. Lengel, “The ‘Genius’ Himself,” Esquire 10 (September 1938):
126; DML, 1: 271–73; and H. L. Mencken to Ernest Boyd, November 13, 1916,
in Letters of H. L. Mencken, ed. Guy J. Forgue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961),
95–96.
38. New York Times, July 12, 1918.
39. DML, 1: 252–53; and L, 1: 152–54.
40. Quoted from ms. at Penn in Oldani, “A Study of The ‘Genius,’” 222.
41. Lars Ahnebrink, “Garland and Dreiser: An Abortive Friendship,” Mid-
west Journal 7 ( Winter 1955–56): 285–92.
42. L, 1: 194.
43. Beach did not sign the preliminary list, but he added his name to the final
protest ( DML, 2: 802; and L, 2: 412n).
44. DML, 1: 279.
45. See, for example, Mencken’s letter to TD on December 16, 1916 ( DML,
1: 281–83).
46. The Hand of the Potter (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1918), reprinted in
CP, 188–282; and D, 135.
47. CP, xx–xxii. See also Frederic E. Rusch, “Dreiser’s Other Tragedy,” Mod-
ern Fiction Studies 23 (Autumn 1977): 449–56. In the winter of 1915, Dreiser wrote
six chapters of a novel to be called The Rake (not to be confused with “The Rake”
of 1900; see chapter 7) based on the Roland Molineux case. The 1915 manuscript
is discussed in conjunction with An American Tragedy in chapter 13.
48. H. V. Gormley to Emma Rector (Flanagan), June 27, 1918; and D holo-
graph, chapter VI (Indiana).
49. Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1990), 2: 142.
50. Sigmund Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920). See Walker Gilmer,
n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 5 7 – 2 6 4
4 4 0
Horace Liveright: Publisher of the Twenties (New York: David Lewis, 1970), 25, 28; CP, xxix–xxx; Frederic E. Rusch, “Dreiser’s Introduction to Freudianism,”
DS 18 (Fall 1987): 34–38; TD, “Olive Brand” in GW, 1: 81–82; and TD’s “Re-
marks” on Freud’s seventy-fifth birthday (1931) in TDS, 263–64. Dreiser was for-
mally introduced to Freud’s theories by Edith DeLong (“Olive Brand”), the fu-
ture wife of Dreiser’s longtime friend Edward H. Smith, in May 1918.
51. Wharton Esherick to W. A. Swanberg, June 25, 1962 (Penn). On the aªair,
see chapter 14.
52. DML, 1: 282–83; Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers (New York: Viking Press,
1969), 240–70; and GW, 2: 769.
53. HH, 378; and The Hand of the Potter, 170, 193.
54. Wharton Esherick to W. A. Swanberg, June 25, 1962.
55. In Defense of Marion: The Love of Marion Bloom & H. L. Mencken, ed.
Edward A. Martin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); and GW, 2: 440.
See also AD, 147–268. Information on the Bloom sisters is generally drawn from
Defense and AD, as well as from Estelle Kubitz [Williams]’s letters at Penn.
56. Estelle Kubitz [Williams] to Marion Bloom, January 24, 1927 (Penn).
57. AD, 153.
58. Mencken later quoted two passages from the diary that present Dreiser
in a depressed state over his literary fortunes in 1917 ( My Life, 218). The type-
script of the diary for 1917–18, now in the New York Public Library, was retained
by Mencken until he wrote his memoir. On October 14, 1938, he wrote of it:
“This curious document was handed to me in 1920 or thereabout by Dreiser’s
secretary. Whether she gave it to me because she was then on bad terms with
Dreiser and eager to make him look foolish or because she thought that the di-
ary would aid me in my writings about him I don’t know. I put it aside and for-
got it completely, and it was only the other day that I disinterred it” ( AD, 147).
59. Estelle Kubitz Williams to Marion Bloom, September 12, 1916, and June
14, 1924 (Penn); also quoted in In Defense of Marion, 40–41, 204.
60. Estelle Kubitz Williams to Marion Bloom, September 12, no year given
(Penn). “To this day,” writes Edward A. Martin, a student of both sisters as
thwarted women of this pre-Flapper era, “Marion and Estelle are remembered
as ‘the exotic Bloom sisters.’” Marion, who resembled her sister closely, though
her eyes were more alluring and her countenance brighter, had fully realized by
1918 that Mencken would never marry her. As the United States entered World
War I, she went to France as a nurse’s aide on an American troop ship. On Oc-
tober 11 she wrote in her journal: “of how we are packed to overflowing with
men bound for foreign soil to kill, of our going to nurse the remnants of hu-
manity, a fearful epidemic [influenza] aboard, while all around are submarines
bent on killing us. What is the meaning of it all ? . . . . It seems hard to connect
disaster with the beauties of the evening, as if a fearful mistake was being made.”
She lived out her final decades in Washington, D.C., totally estranged for un-
n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 6 4 – 2 6 7
4 4 1
known reasons from Estelle. Shortly before her death in 1975, she—like Estelle—
shared her lover’s intimate thoughts by selling her Mencken letters to the Enoch
Pratt Library of Baltimore. See In Defense of Marion, xl, 90.
61. Louise Campbell to TD, February 24, 1917 (Penn). See AD, 157, for the
fact that she was still married when she first wrote to Dreiser.
62. Letters to Louise, ed. Louise Campbell (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1959), 10–11.
63. AD, 156–58.
64. FF, 363; and Swanberg, Dreiser, 210.
65. H. L. Mencken, “Theodore Dreiser,” A Book of Prefaces (New York: Al-
fred A. Knopf, 1917), reprinted in DML, 2: 775–90; and My Life, 223.
t w e l v e . b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
1. “Dreiser Favors Federal Control; Hits Financiers,” Huntington [Indiana]
Press, June 18, 1919; and DML, 1: 295–96.
2. Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant: A History of the Republic (Lex-
ington, Mass.: D. C. Heath Company, 1975), 777.
3. “Life, Art and America,” Seven Arts 1 (February 1917): 363–89, reprinted
that year in pamphlet form and in Hey, 252–76.
4. “Mr. Bottom,” The Social War 1 (April 1917): 2; “Our Greatest Writer Tells
What’s Wrong with our Newspapers,” Pep 2 ( July 1917): 8–9, reprinted as “Our
Amazing Illusioned Press,” New York Call 16 (December 16, 1971): 3.
5. Robert H. Elias, Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1970; orig. pub. 1948), 204.