The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

wasn’t grasping his face. Dreiser tried to smother the flames with his coat,

but it was too little too late. Yet his reporter’s instincts were at once acti-

vated. While the injured and dead were en route by a special train to Al-

ton, Dreiser made a list of the names and injuries for the story he would

write. But before he could get away to write it, he was surrounded in Al-

ton by anxious friends and relatives. Consequently prevented from rush-

ing back to St. Louis to write his story, he stood before the crowd and read

oª the names and injuries to the worried and grief-stricken crowd.22

“One of the most appalling and disastrous wrecks that has occurred in

years,” Dreiser wrote that evening under the leader “Burned to Death” in

the Globe-Democrat of January 22, 1893, “followed the negligence of a

switchman on the Big Four road at Wann, Ill., yesterday morning.” The

story, more than five thousand words in length, is remarkable for its Balza-

cian detail, though the narrative itself seems to lack some of the Dreiser-

ian pace. It provided not only all the names of the dead and injured but an

hour-by-hour account of the accident, with nothing left out except the ob-

vious negligence of the railroad itself. Newspapers could criticize the po-

lice, but rarely corporate America before the advent of the muckrakers and

yellow journalists at the turn of the century. He followed up the next day

t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g

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with “Sixteen Dead,” almost as long as the first report. Here Dreiser was

not squeamish in relating the medical situation. “Their eyes are burned out.

Their ears are great, swollen sores, or mere crusts,” he wrote. “They have

breathed in the flames and the fumes of the burning oil, and, as a conse-

quence, their mouths and throats are raw and bleeding.”23

Dreiser found Dick Wood’s illustration for the first story disappointing,

commenting that it lacked all “spirit or meaning.” It was a crude represen-

tation in which the figures approaching the wreck looked like cartoon car-

icatures of human forms; the train itself was hardly recognizable as such.

Wood’s lackluster performance did nothing, however, to diminish McCul-

lagh’s warm reaction to Dreiser’s achievement. The reporter he had sum-

moned from Chicago at McEnnis’s suggestion seemed to have lived up to

his recommendation. “I wanted to say to you that I liked that story you

wrote very much—very much indeed,” the editor-in-chief told Dreiser in

an uncharacteristic show of cordiality. “I like to recognize a good piece of

work when I see it. I have raised your salary to twenty-five dollars.”24 Mc-

Cullagh then reached into his pocket and drew out a yellowed twenty dol-

lar bill, which he handed over as a bonus.

The story of the train wreck and subsequent bonus comes, of course,

from Newspaper Days. Famous people often write autobiographies in part

to preempt the inevitable more critical biographies with favorable facts that

sometimes stray into fiction. Such memoirs are particularly useful in con-

trolling any early parts of a biography, where contradictory facts are hazy

or more often unavailable. Doubtless, Dreiser distorted parts of his auto-

biography, either consciously or unconsciously. McCullagh did not live to

confirm or deny the story as told in Newspaper Days, but one of Dreiser’s

fellow newspaper reporters cast some doubt on this tale of heroic on-the-

scene reporting. Arch T. Edmonston wrote Dreiser at the beginning of the

Great Depression, when Dreiser was rich and famous as the author of An

American Tragedy, claiming that he had been the reporter sent to Alton Junc-

tion to cover the story and that Dreiser covered it only from St. Louis. In

1929 Edmonston was sick and out of work and asking for a loan, so there

is no reason he would have lied in his letter or claimed something which

would annoy his potential benefactor.

“We ‘did’ a railroad wreck together,” Edmonston wrote. “It was in Illi-

nois a few miles East of St. Louis. You ‘did’ the St. Louis end of it—the old

Union Depot, and I hastened to the scene in an old ‘sea going hack,’ tak-

ing a telegraph operator with me, and finally wired in about 2000 words.”

(Although there were three diªerent railroad companies running trains be-

t h i s m a t t e r o f r e p o r t i n g

5 9

tween St. Louis and Alton, travel by boat may have been more expeditious,

especially after a wreck.) The main problem with believing Edmonston,

whose own memory by this time may have been unreliable, is that he re-

calls that he and Dreiser were colleagues not on the Globe-Democrat, but

the St. Louis Republic, which all other evidence indicates Dreiser did not

join until long after any major train wreck occurred, as Edmonston put it,

“in Illinois a few miles East of St. Louis.”25

–

Since Dreiser was never a newspaper editor or a full-time columnist with

a byline, it is often a challenge to identify his journalism. He wrote neither

the Broadway editorials of Walt Whitman, whose democratic catalogs even-

tually surfaced in Leaves of Grass, nor the comic hyperbole of Mark Twain,

whose correspondences from the Holy Land revealed his early suspicions

about the “damned human race.”26 Most of what has been identified as his

reporting (based either on his penchant for detail or on cross-references to

items in Newspaper Days) focused on police and court stories of domestic

violence, rapes (then euphemistically called “outrages”), and kidnappings

or visiting celebrities, including famous clairvoyants passing through town,

plus the usual run of assignments doled out by the city editor. Dreiser

claimed to have interviewed the famed boxer John L. Sullivan, but the only

recovered piece in the Globe-Democrat about Sullivan is a condescending

description of the great man’s uninterrupted inebriation, a tone decidedly

too harsh for the younger Dreiser’s pen.27

There were opportunities—however limited—for the future fictionist’s

creative energies which contain unimpeachable evidence of Dreiser’s au-

thorship. In addition to his regular reportorial duties, he was assigned a

column, which had been passed around the o‹ce, called “Heard in the

Corridors.” The idea may have been an oªshoot of the formal newspaper

interview, which McCullagh is credited with inventing. A similar infor-

mal mix of fiction and fact, called “About the Hotels,” ran in the Chicago

Globe, where McCullagh’s influence operated through McEnnis. There

Dreiser had already written three or four such pieces in which a traveling

salesman or a local celebrity is interviewed in a hotel lobby. One column

features Dreiser’s college roommate by name, and another dwells on Poe

and spiritualism.28

It was from writing “Heard in the Corridors” and other interview pieces

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that Dreiser acquired an early fondness for the setting of the hotel lobby

furnished with rocking chairs that would become George Hurstwood’s last

sanctuary in Sister Carrie, before his clothes give him away as down and

out. The “Heard in the Corridors” interviews, some real, most fabulous,

take place in the following St. Louis hotels: the Laclede, Lindell, Southern,

Richelieu, and St. James. Often he introduced real people known to him,

such as his brother Paul, into these fictitious conversations. Recurring sub-

jects in the column were superstition, man’s best friend, mother love, reli-

gion, the moral dangers of the American Dream or success, realism, the

economy, socialism, legendary or unsolved crimes, reformers and social

panaceas, mortality, and local color items of general interest.

Dreiser’s subjects here come from the same sentimental world of Paul’s

songs about longings for home or mothers who have died while waiting for

their wandering sons or daughters to return home. Among the stories for

the column of December 24, 1892, Paul is interviewed about a Connecti-

cut mill accident, perhaps linking their own father’s mill work in Con-

necticut and his mill accident in Indiana. On another subject, published

on February 20, 1893, the hotel interviewee speaks of the painful eªect of

a letter from his dead mother (“written to me months before when at

school”), uncovered as he repacked his trunks. Dreiser clearly was reach-

ing into his family past for his fictions long before Sister Carrie. In “Heard

in the Corridors” he also used a version of his near premature burial while

spelunking outside Bloomington (December 30, 1892). We find as well the

seeds of later attitudes. One on government control of industries in Rus-

sia regrets only that the state is controlled by a czar instead of the people

( January 2, 1893).

Not long after his (or Edmonston’s) stories on the train wreck, the posi-

tion of dramatic editor on the Globe-Democrat came open. It too had been