The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

York Day, February 10, 1929; and L, 2: 652.

38. Hapgood, “Is Dreiser Anti-Semitic?” 437–38.

39. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 383–84; and Gladys D. Mack to TD, April

n o t e s t o p a g e s 3 6 2 – 3 7 1

4 5 5

12, 1935 (Penn). During the centennial celebration of the publication of Sister Carrie, at the University of Pennsylvania on November 7–9, 2000, the keynote

speaker Joseph Epstein deplored Dreiser’s anti-Semitism; see his Partial Payments:

On Writers and Their Lives (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 259–79.

40. “Dreiser Denies He Is Anti-Semitic,” New Masses 15 (April 30, 1935): 10–

11; and L, 2: 714. See also Hapgood, Victorian in the Modern World, 266–74; and

Mike Gold, “The Gun Is Loaded, Dreiser,” New Masses 15 (May 7, 1935): 14–15.

41. TD to John Cowper Powys, November 21, 1932 (Virginia); and L, 2: 643.

42. “Dreiser Overlooks His Former Experiences with Hollywood, For Things

Will Be Diªerent in the Filming of ‘Jennie Gerhardt,’” New York World Telegram,

December 15, 1932; Hussman, “Squandered Possibilities,” 194; Swanberg, Dreiser,

401; “Dreiser Says NRA [National Recovery Act] Is Training Public,” New York

Times, August 28, 1933; and L, 3: 789.

43. “The Epic Sinclair,” Esquire 2 (December 1934): 32–33, 178–79.

44. “‘Tobacco and Men,’ Motion Picture Idea” (Texas). The film scenario later

became the basis for Borden Dell’s The Tobacco Men: A Novel Based on Notes by

Theodore Dreiser and Hy Kraft (1965); Kraft wrote the foreword, in which he dis-

cusses his collaboration with Dreiser.

45. Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,

1990), 2: 384–85; and Moods Philosophic and Emotional (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1935), v. Privately, Dreiser would have hardly agreed with Ish-Kishor’s

comparison. Earlier when a journalist tried to flatter Dreiser by saying that his

verses were “more musical” than anything she had read in Whitman, Dreiser ex-

ploded: “They can’t touch Whitman . . . Not Whitman’s poetry. Much of Whit-

man’s writing was not poetry at all—it was beautiful prose-philosophy. But when

Whitman begins to sing, he sings! Have you read Whitman? . . . Have you read

his ‘When I Heard the Learned Astronomer’? No. Have you read ‘The Noise-

less Patient Spider’? And there is one beginning, ‘A child asked me what is the

grass’” (actually a misquoted line, not the beginning, of “Song of Myself ”); see

Jean West Maury, “A Neighborly Call on Theodore Dreiser,” Boston Evening Tran-

script, January 29, 1927.

46. Marguerite Tjader [Harris] to W. A. Swanberg, June 8, 1962 (Penn); L,

2: 710n; and Mandy See, “‘It Was Written That We Meet’: Theodore Dreiser

and George Douglas,” DS 34 (Summer 2003): 35–57.

47. “All ethnology, geology, zoology, biology, botany, history, painting, sculp-

ture, architecture, letters, explorations, and what not demonstrate that the mind

is nothing more than a sensory registration of endlessly repeated and most often

related stimuli from matter-energy sources and structures compelled, directed,

and controlled by whatever evokes, directs, and controls matter-energy” ( Notes

on Life, ed. Marguerite Tjader and John J. McAleer [University: University of

Alabama Press, 1974], 65). These notes, which in manuscript consisted of eighty-

seven labeled packages when delivered to the University of Pennsylvania archives

n o t e s t o p a g e s 3 7 1 – 3 7 3

4 5 6

in 1952, date back to 1915, but most were written in the 1930s when Dreiser strug-

gled after a formal classification of these thoughts. See John J. McAleer, “Dreiser’s

‘Notes on Life,’” Library Chronicle 38 ( Winter 1972): 78–91, for a defense of

Dreiser’s achievement in these writings.

48. TD to Ruth Kennell, April 30, 1935 (Penn).

49. “Mark the Double Twain,” English Journal 24 (October 1935): 615–27.

50. DML, 2: 570–71.

51. L, 2: 784–85.

52. L, 2: 629; and TD to Ruth Kennell, February 24, 1928 (Penn).

53. Eugene O’Neill to TD, December 3, 1936 (Penn); Faulkner quoted in

Lundén, “Dreiser and the Nobel Prize,” 229.

54. Richard Lingeman, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street (New York: Ran-

dom House, 2002), 279–82.

55. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 398–99; and undated press clipping about

Dreiser’s speech in TD to Marguerite Tjader [Harris], September 6, [1938]

(Texas). See also Marguerite Tjader [Harris], Love That Will Not Let Me Go: My

Time with Theodore Dreiser, ed. Lawrence E. Hussman (New York: Peter Lang,

1998), 82n.

56. L, 3: 807–10; and Louise Campbell, “Portrait of an Artist: What I Know

about Theodore Dreiser,” unpublished MS. [1931], 5; and L, 3: 810.

57. Marguerite Tjader [Harris], “John Cowper Powys and Theodore Dreiser:

A Friendship,” Powys Review 2 ( Winter/Spring 1979–1980): 16–23. See also

Robert P. Saalbach, “Dreiser and the Powys Family,” DN 6 (Fall 1975): 10–16.

58. “To Oscar Wilde: Written in his one time cell in Reading Gaol” (Texas);

and L, 3: 877–78.

59. D. B. Graham, “Dreiser and Thoreau: An Early Influence,” DN 7 (Spring

1976): 1–4; and Living Thoughts of Thoreau, Presented by Theodore Dreiser (New

York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1939).

60. L, 2: 639–40; TD to Helen Richardson, August 19, 1938 (Penn); L, 3:

813–15; and “Spanish Civilians to Get U.S. Flour,” New York Times, December

30, 1938. A year later Roosevelt once again invited Dreiser to visit him in the

White House. Shortly thereafter, the president thanked Dreiser for inscribed

copies of Twelve Men, Moods, and Living Thoughts of Thoreau ( L, 2: 849–50).

61. L, 3: 816; TD to Thelma Cudlipp [Whitman], May 12, 1936; and TD to

Hazel Mack Godwin, November 2 and 23, 1942 (Penn).

62. L, 3: 823.

s i x t e e n . f a c i n g w e s t

1. L, 3: 833–34.

2. TD, “Good and Evil,” North American Review 246 (Autumn 1938):

n o t e s t o p a g e s 3 7 4 – 3 8 3

4 5 7

67–86. See also his “Kismet,” Esquire 3 ( January 1935): 29, 175–76; and “The Myth of Individuality,” American Mercury 31 (March 1934): 337–42, reprinted

in Molders of American Thought, 1933–34, ed. William H. Cordell (Garden City,

N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1934). For Dreiser’s early reading of Emerson, see D,

252, 370.

3. Thomas P. Riggio, “Dreiser on Society and Literature: The San Francisco

Exposition Interview,” American Literary Realism 11 (Autumn 1978): 284–94.

4. L, 3: 844; and Lillian Rosenthal to W. A. Swanberg, March 5, 1963 (Penn).

In A Place in the Sun, the names of the characters were changed. Sondra Finch-

ley became Angela Vickers, Clyde Gri‹ths became George Eastman, and

Roberta Alden became Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters). The film, directed and

produced by George Stevens, captured six Oscars in 1951, but seems antiquated

today; see Eugene L. Huddleston, “What a Diªerence Thirty Years Make: A Place

in the Sun Today,” DN 15 (Fall 1984): 1–12.

5. Marguerite Tjader [Harris], Theodore Dreiser: A New Dimension (Norwalk,

Conn.: Silvermine Publishers, 1965), 147; and ML, 276.

6. DML, 2: 651; and TD, “U.S. Must Not Be Bled for Imperial Britain,” Co-

lumbia Broadcasting System radio program, November 9, 1940; printed in People’s

World (San Francisco), November 12, 1940.

7. TDCR, 651–54. The book was originally to be published by the Veritas

Press, where its head, Oskar Piest, oªered Dreiser a flat fee of $5,000. The orig-

inal charge to Dreiser was to write a book “designed to show the futility of Amer-

ica getting into the war,” but Piest broke the contract when Dreiser also indi-

cated that American “salvation rests in communism” ( William C. Lengel to TD,

September 19, 1940). Lengel then arranged for the manuscript to be published

by Modern Age Books (Lengel to TD, December 4 and 5, 1940 [Penn]). Other

suggested titles for American Is Worth Saving were “Keep Out,” “My Country

Tis of Thee” and “Is Democracy Worth Saving?”

8. Tjader [Harris], Dreiser: A New Dimension, 174; and TDCR, 655–56.

9. FBI Report, October 15, 1941.

10. L, 3: 932–38; William C. Lengel to TD, August 16, 1940; and TD to

Lengel, August 22, 1940 (Penn).

11. L, 3: 931. In 1942 Dreiser told Mencken: “I ceased following Hitler when

in 1940 [ sic] he attacked Russia—my pet. At first I thought he had a progressive

program for a United States of Europe—a better intellectual & social Europe”

( DML, 2: 691).

12. L, 3: 768–69; and TD, “Sherwood Anderson,” in Homage to Sherwood

Anderson, ed. Paul P. Appel (Mamaroneck, N.Y.: Paul P. Appel, Publisher, 1970),

1–2.

13. TD to William C. Lengel, May 6, 1939, May 28 and October 8, 1941;

Lengel to TD, June 5, 1941; TD to Earle H. Balch, Vice-President at Putnam’s,

n o t e s t o p a g e s 3 8 3 – 3 8 8

4 5 8

December 4, 1941; TD to Lengel, May 6, 1939 (Penn), printed in Louis Oldani,

“Dreiser and Paperbacks: An Unpublished Letter,” DN 6 (Fall 1975): 1–9; DML,