It was about two weeks before Christmas. His employer, who was fond of
young Dreiser, confronted him with indisputable evidence of his “theft.”
(Later in Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy the same question of in-
tent lingers about the crime.) Mortified and even fearful of going to jail,
he was let go but was expected to repay the amount, which he apparently
did. “God,” he wrote in Dawn, “I have never taken a dime since!”40
Somewhat surprisingly, his concern about going to jail was second to his
cringing worry that his father would find out. It was bad enough to have
to come home and announce that he had been laid oª “because of busi-
ness” and probably wouldn’t find another job until after the New Year, quite
another that he might follow his brothers Paul and Rome into the crimi-
nal courts. What if his father inquired at the Lovell Company the same
way he had gone to Conklin after he had stopped paying his son? Dreiser’s
anxiety here suggests that, whatever he thought of John Paul’s religion, the
father was still a moral authority to his son. He doesn’t mention it, but as
a lapsed Catholic, not simply an “inoculated Catholic,” as he later described
himself, Dreiser might even have considered going to confession over the
theft. Although he was “through” with the Church, the Church apparently
was not quite through with him. Indeed, throughout his description of him-
self as a Catholic, there is a striking absence or evasiveness—never a word
about having made his First Holy Communion or confirmation, impor-
tant junctures in any young Catholic’s life, or his possible service as an al-
tar boy.
But Dreiser was by now pretty much finished with youth, and with that
had gone possibly the last vestiges of his Catholicism. As he watched his
father fret about the house, preoccupied mainly with religious concerns,
he saw the end not only of his conventionally religious consciousness but
also the integrity of the family that had nourished it. Claire and Mame, the
youngest and oldest sisters, were at odds over various issues, including
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
4 5
Mame’s condescending attitude toward her siblings following her marriage
to Brennan, a reformed alcoholic who came from a well-to-do family in
Rochester, New York. (The couple, in fact, was never bound by more than
a common-law marriage, although it lasted until Brennan’s death in 1928.)41
Whenever Mame and Austin, who had moved to Brennan’s hometown,
came to Chicago, for weeks at a time, they had stayed with the Dreiser fam-
ily, usually in the best rooms, to the consternation of other family mem-
bers. The family turmoil increased when Mame accused Theo of another
theft. During her illness, Sarah had received a postal order from Paul for
ten dollars. Wanting for whatever reasons to keep the money a secret, she
sent Theo to the post o‹ce with permission to cash it. Afterward, the ter-
minally ailing woman forgot and denied receiving the check when Paul
wrote again to inquire about it. Following her mother’s death, Mame tried
to initiate an o‹cial inquiry at the post o‹ce, thereby threatening her
brother with a federal oªense. Infuriated because—so he insists in Dawn—
he was innocent of the charge of theft this time, he rarely spoke to his
eldest sister for the next fifteen years.42
By March 1891, such apprehensions and quarrels without Sarah’s inter-
vention broke up the family. Angry at Mame, Dreiser sided with Claire
against her, and followed Claire and Ed to a “rival home” on Taylor Street,
only a few blocks from Flourney Street. The other sisters also jumped ship.
Only Theresa and Al remained, Al saying the only decent thing was to keep
a home for his aged father. The distraught father’s pleas for family unity
fell on deaf ears. The “decent” thing to do, as it would be to so many of
Dreiser’s fictional characters, was simply unattractive. Dreiser marched out
along with the rest, in spite of his abiding sense of the unfairness of it all.
Much later, in Newspaper Days, he would recall this moment with sadness
and remorse. Perhaps still ringing in his ears so many years after his father’s
death in 1900 was the old man’s “Dorsh, I done the best I could.”
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
4 6
t h r e e
This Matter of Reporting
–
Imagine a dreamy cub of twenty, soon to be twenty-one, long,
lank, spindling, a pair of gold-framed specs on his nose, his hair
combed à la pompadour, a new spring suit, consisting of a pair of
light check trousers and bright blue coat and vest, with a brown
fedora hat and new yellow shoes, starting out to connect
himself with the newspaper press of Chicago.
N E W S PA P E R D AY S
the taylor street living arrangement lasted barely more than a
month, for Claire proved to be neither housekeeper nor cook. Ed moved
to the nearby home of the DeGoods, whose daughter he was seeing, and
Theo followed soon after. Claire subsequently relocated to a rooming house
on Ogden Place. The brothers shared a room for a dollar-fifty a week and
paid twenty-five cents apiece for whatever meals they ate with the family.
Dreiser continued working with the Corbin Company, another installment
collection agency, a job he had found about the time the Flourney Street
household had broken up. But he had already set his mind on becoming a
journalist. In fact, by the Christmas season of 1891 he worked part-time for
the Chicago Herald—but not as a reporter.
He answered its ad on December 17: “young men—two, of good ad-
dress; must be good penmen; salary $1.50 per day.”1 Dreiser and more than
a dozen other young men were hired for a holiday campaign the Herald was
running called “Santa Is Jolly.” On Christmas day thousands of toys were
handed out to children who had sent their wish lists to Santa Claus in care
of the newspaper. ( Just what good penmanship had to do with wrapping
and doling out Christmas presents remains unclear.) In his autobiography
Dreiser misremembered the advertisement as suggesting the possibility of
a permanent position, but of course he received no such “promotion.”
“Here was I,” he recalled, “. . . a victim of what socialists would look
4 7
upon as economic error, almost as worthy of free gifts as any other, and yet
lined up with fifteen or twenty other economic victims—as poorly oª as
myself—all out of a job, many of them almost out at the elbows.” When
Dreiser wrote this sentence in his autobiography twenty-some years later,
he was living in Greenwich Village and surrounded by what his friend
H. L. Mencken called “the red ink fraternity.” Yet underlying all his think-
ing since his year at Indiana University when Russell Ratliª had introduced
him to the various socioeconomic philosophers, was the idea of an inequity
that was not only social but cosmic. It underscores the pathos of both George
Hurstwood’s fatal Bowery descent and Clyde Gri‹ths’s doom in the elec-
tric chair. Having been exposed to Huxley and Nietzsche, Dreiser was early
on aware of what he regarded as the post–Civil War drift of the country
“to monopoly and so to oligarchy.”2
Chicago in the 1890s was an exciting place to be a newspaperman, second
only to New York. It could boast of such journalistic lights and column hu-
morists as Eugene Field, George Ade, Finley Peter Dunne, and Brand Whit-
lock. By April 1892, Dreiser, unable any longer to resist the call from the
Fourth Estate, simply quit the Corbin Company, without having found
another job. Determined now to enter journalism, come what may, he had
saved $65 to underwrite his search and vowed not to abandon the quest
unless threatened by starvation. After a first fruitless survey of the various
Chicago papers, he decided to focus all his energies on just one. He picked
the poorest in the city, the Daily Globe, figuring that, with no experience
and really no idea of what a journalist actually did, his best chance lay with
the least competitive newspaper. The Globe, which was owned and con-
trolled by a local politician, was located on Fifth Avenue, directly across
from Chicago’s best newspaper at the time, the Daily News. Dreiser came
to the newsroom every day, as if he worked there (some of the reporters
thought he did after a while), and John Maxwell, then a copyreader there,
encouraged him to hang on until a position came open.
Dreiser did eventually get himself hired as a reporter for the Globe, mainly
by agreeing to sell door-to-door a college memoir by one of the editors,
which then led to a trial reporting assignment. Harry Gissell, an “intimate
of the city editor,” had privately and pseudonymously printed a third-rate