and trap undiscerning strangers. The police, who were involved in or at
least aware of the scheme, finally had to act against the perpetrators be-
cause of the notoriety created by the newspapers. The likely collusion of
police and criminals served to reinforce Dreiser’s cynicism about phony or
unfair social standards and conventions. Furthermore, he could not have
missed the irony in the fact that the very newspaper that sent him out to
expose criminal activity was owned by a celebrated politician who ran a
string of prostitution and gambling houses, also with the cooperation of a
corrupt police force.9
During the summer the city editor who had hired Dreiser was replaced
by John T. McEnnis, now an alcoholic but once an up-and-coming news-
paperman in St. Louis. He aªected a western style of dress that later re-
minded Dreiser of Bret Harte, especially because of his wide-brimmed hat.
Dreiser recalled that McEnnis “furthered my career as rapidly as he could,
the while that he borrowed a goodly portion of my small salary wherewith
to drink.”10 Like Maxwell, McEnnis liked and encouraged him. He regaled
the young reporter with stories of the great newspaper editors of the day,
such as Charles A. Dana of the New York Tribune and Joseph B. McCul-
lagh of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and declared that Dreiser’s talents man-
dated that he move east to New York—but first by detouring to McCul-
lagh in St. Louis. Through a mutual friend who had just moved from St.
Louis, he told McCullagh about Dreiser, and within weeks Dreiser received
a wire that a job on the Globe-Democrat was waiting for him at twenty dol-
lars a week. The salary was above average for new reporters, but the Globe-
Democrat was known to pay its staª superior wages.
Dreiser took the train south to St. Louis in late October. Before he left
Chicago, however, he had to disentangle himself romantically. By that sum-
mer, he had become involved with three diªerent women. There was still
Nellie Anderson, but he had also become interested in a young woman on
Wabash Avenue by the name of Winstead. And more important than Miss
Winstead was Lois Zahn, whom he had met shortly after meeting Nellie.
While the Dreiser family was still together on Flourney Street, Claire had
brought Lois home one night. Lois had another, older beau, a telegraph
operator, but she managed to keep him in the background while she re-
sponded to Dreiser’s advances. He ultimately became so deeply infatuated
with her that he broke up with Nellie and only occasionally saw Miss Win-
stead. He also declares in the unabridged edition of Newspaper Days that
t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g
5 2
Lois was his first sexual partner, thereby casting doubt on the story in Dawn
of the baker’s daughter in Warsaw.11 (But, then, Dreiser seems uncertain
throughout his autobiography exactly when he experienced his first real sex-
ual intercourse.)
That opportunity with Lois Zahn came about shortly before his depar-
ture for St. Louis. One evening the couple retreated to Theo’s rented room,
and “in the glow of a cheap lamp,” they fell into the “creaky yellow-pine
contraption” that was his bed. But their passion was preempted by Theo’s
early ejaculation. Still fretting over the imagined eªects of his teenage mas-
turbation, he regarded this accident as evidence of “impotence” or even
sterility.12 Afterward, he said he felt closer to Lois, yet subsequently spent
time with Miss Winstead and finally left the city without even saying good-
bye. As he had approached Lois’s house late one night to do so (thinking
vaguely he would send for her once established in St. Louis), he found her
with her telegraph operator and left without announcing himself.
Before he left the Chicago Globe, Dreiser wrote a few more straight news
stories and “even essayed a few parables of my own,” which Maxwell pub-
lished after much scrutiny and scowling. One of the parables was “The Re-
turn of Genius,” published under the name of Carl Dreiser on October 23,
1892. (For some unknown reason, “Carl” was Maxwell’s nickname for
Dreiser, but Theo told his family that he had signed it in honor of Sylvia’s
illegitimate son, Carl, now six years old and possibly back in the care of his
reluctant mother.) The tale anticipates Dreiser’s idea of himself in The “Ge-
nius,” at least in its autobiographical dash: “There was born, once upon a
time, a great Genius. His younger years were spent in poverty and sorrow.
Yet his brain teemed with noble thoughts and grand purposes.”13 Its tone
also bears a strong resemblance to Dreiser’s self-portrait in Dawn, where he
tells us that his mother and siblings suspected he was diªerent and perhaps
somehow gifted.
In “The Return of Genius,” the god of genius comes to the young man
as he pines for wealth, pleasure, and enduring fame. The visionary prom-
ises to fulfill his wishes, provided the genius agrees never to see or hear of
his fame. He is ensconced in a silver mansion with every convenience, but
he eventually feels isolated from the world and society. He is warned in vain
when he determines to abandon his Faustian paradise that doing so will en-
sure that his name is forgotten. Dreiser’s moral here is not altogether clear.
One biographer suggests that to Dreiser achievement had become mean-
ingless apart from an imperfect world. Another suggests it reveals Dreiser’s
t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g
5 3
recognition that daydreaming alone was useless; life demanded action.14 Yet
the fact that the protagonist is designated a genius may be more significant
than the outcome of the story. At twenty-one Dreiser already knew he was
destined for something out of the ordinary. He suspected that he could
write, although he sometimes underplays this ability in his autobiography.
He was also beginning to think that his talent, like the gift of the silver
mansion, had little to do with anything but chance. Life was something of
a fable in which the “god of genius” was yet another fickle agent of fate.
–
Dreiser arrived in St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon and registered at the Sil-
ver Moon Hotel, which had been recommended by McEnnis and was right
around the corner from the Globe-Democrat at Sixth and Pine. It was al-
ready dark by the time he checked into his austere hotel room and walked
around the heart of the river city. Its decrepit brick buildings contrasted
sharply with Chicago’s new spirit of growth as it prepared for the World’s
Fair. And its Sunday quiet reflected more than the Sabbath. By that fall of
1892, “the Mound City” (as it was known for its pre-Columbian burial sites)
had a population of almost half a million. Since 1890, however, it had ex-
perienced a dramatic decline in industrial growth, mainly because the new
national system of railroads had replaced river tra‹c on the Mississippi as
the means of bringing raw material such as Texas cattle to St. Louis for pro-
cessing and distribution. Also, smaller railroad hubs like Kansas City,
Kansas, were becoming more attractive sites for slaughterhouses and meat-
packing centers. Lighter industries such as clothing, construction, and can-
ning, as well as the city’s largest enterprise, brewing, also began to decline.
And the economic depression of 1893 was just around the corner. Despite
its rapid growth as an industrial and commercial hub in the 1880s, the man-
ufacturing growth of St. Louis would increase by only two percent in the
following decade.15
St. Louis also lagged behind Chicago in newspapers, having only a few,
including the two Dreiser would work for—the Globe-Democrat and the
Republic. In a turnabout from the Civil War days, the first was Republican
and the second Democratic. Postbellum Missouri was almost completely
Democratic, but the Globe-Democrat oªered its voters a formidable antag-
onist in its editor, Joseph B. McCullagh, whom Eugene Field described in
“Little Mack”:
t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g
5 4
This talk about the journalists that run the East is bosh,
We’ve got a Western editor that’s little, but O gosh!
He lives here in Mizzoora, where the people are so set
In ante-bellum notions they vote for Jackson yet;
But the paper he is running makes the rusty fossils swear,—
The smartest, likeliest paper that is printed anywhere!
And best of all, the paragraphs are pointed as a tack
And that’s because they emanate
From little Mack.16
“In architecture,” Field continued, McCullagh was “what you’d call a
chunky man,” and Dreiser depicts him as “a short, thick, aggressive, rather
pugnacious and defensive-looking person of Irish extraction, who looked
when I saw him as though he were quite capable of editing this and a dozen