The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

crowded capitals had been imported to take their places. When Dreiser re-

turned to Pittsburgh and ventured into its East End, he found the absolute

antithesis of Homestead in the homes of their new American masters. He

entered the exclusive neighborhood of the Fricks, the Thaws, the Olivers,

the Thompsons, and the Phippses, whose imposing mansions lined Fifth

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Avenue in the area of Schenley Park. “Never, I think,” he wrote in his au-

tobiography, “owing perhaps to Homestead and a world of low small yel-

low shacks which lay to the right of this thoroughfare as I walked east, did

the mere possession of wealth—a great house and grounds, a carriage and

the like—impress me so keenly.”18

Today, Pittsburgh is marked indelibly by the presence of these moguls—

memorialized by Frick Park, two Carnegie libraries, and the Phipps Con-

servatory next to Carnegie Mellon University. In fact, by 1890 Carnegie had

already built in Allegheny the first of the hundreds of libraries he gave to

America. At the time, it wasn’t clear whether Allegheny or Pittsburgh would

prevail as the major city, and Carnegie picked the wrong one. But, as we

shall see, his miscalculation played an important part in the literary ap-

prenticeship of Theodore Dreiser. By 1894 Carnegie was also completing

his largest library, in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh. Dreiser recalls in

his memoirs admiring its white limestone, today somewhat darkened by

the many years in which the steel industry once rendered Pittsburgh “black

as night.”

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Dreiser rented a room on Wylie Avenue in what is today a black ghetto des-

ignated as the Hill District (part of which was torn down some years ago

to make room for a sports arena). It was an easy cable car ride downtown

to the corner of Smithfield and Diamond (now Forbes) streets, where a

number of newspapers were clustered together in diªerent buildings. Pitts-

burgh boasted at least two morning and two afternoon papers, probably

more. Dreiser started with the morning papers and visited the Times, where

he was cordially informed there were no openings. The Dispatch, however,

seemed more promising. He was interviewed by Harrison Null Gaither, the

soft-spoken city editor, who wore an artificial hand, or “gloved dummy.”

There was no work at the moment, but Gaither expected a vacancy soon

and urged the applicant to hang around for a week or ten days. Dreiser in-

dicated that he could wait, but no longer than three or four days. Gaither

promised him eighteen dollars a week if the job materialized. In the mean-

time Henry cabled from Toledo with an oªer of a job on the Blade at the

same salary. At that price, neither oªer attracted him; he had already made

more in St. Louis. Somehow—Dreiser is vague on this in his memoirs—

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he allegedly changed the “$18” to “$25” on Henry’s telegram and used it to

persuade Gaither to make a firm oªer and pay the higher salary.19

Before he reported for work on the Dispatch, he crossed one of several

bridges over the Monongahela and boarded an incline to the top of Mt.

Washington and Grandview Avenue, where the vista quite astonished this

product of the flatlands of southwestern Indiana. Years later, after he had

feasted on the views of “New York from the heights of the Palisades and

the hills of Staten Island, also on Rome from the Pincian gardens, and on

Florence from the region of San Miniato, as well as on Pasadena and Los

Angeles from the slopes of Mt. Lowe,” he recalled he had nowhere else

beheld

a scene which impressed me more, not only for the rugged beauty of the

mountains which encircle the city on every hand, but for the three rivers

which run as threads of bright metal, dividing it into three parts, and for the

several cities which here joined together as one, their clambering streets pre-

senting a checkered pattern emphasized here and there by the soot-darkened

spires of churches and the walls of the taller and newer and therefore cleaner

o‹ce buildings.

Godlike almost, the future determinist looked down on the “clambering

streets” of Pittsburgh. He was within only a few years of writing “The

Shining Slave Makers,” where the protagonist falls asleep and wakes up as

an ant.20

The Dispatch was published in a three-story building not nearly as ele-

gant as that which housed its morning competitor. It had a twelve-page for-

mat during the week and extended sections on Sunday. In politics it was

xenophobically anti-labor. A fellow reporter by the name of Martyn spoke

to Dreiser of the appalling wages, even for skilled laborers. “But you can’t

say anything about that in Pittsburgh,” he told him. “If I should want to

talk I would have to get out of here. The papers won’t use a thing unfa-

vorable to the magnates in any of these fields.” In reporting a strike in the

Connellsville coke region that spring, the Dispatch headlines spoke of “Mobs

of Foreigners” who could “scarcely speak English” and the “Good Work of

the Armed Deputies.” The subsequent jailing of the strikers (for “rioting”)

was considered “A Good Haul.”21 One of Dreiser’s first assignments was to

interview Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed at the Monongahela House

about the “menace” Coxey’s Army posed. Reed was a strong supporter of

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Carnegie’s plutocratic ways, and in Newspaper Days Dreiser remembers him

as denouncing the fledgling labor movement. Curiously, the Dispatch ar-

ticle attributed to Dreiser reports Reed’s fear that Coxey’s Army was evi-

dence of a general unrest in the country which Washington was so far ig-

noring. Even later, he wrote a favorable report on Reed’s career in Success

magazine.22

Dreiser’s “beat” was Allegheny on the north side, covering city hall and

the police station, which were housed in the same building at Federal and

Ohio streets. The complex faced Ober Park and stood next to the Allegheny

Market House, a white structure of shops and food stands now replaced by

a modern mini-mall. Allegheny City Hall was demolished in the late 1930s,

but Carnegie’s first library nearby still stands, having undergone extensive

restoration in the 1970s and now looking much as it did when it was con-

structed in 1890. The gray-granite edifice with a five-story clock tower

housed a library and a music hall. The library itself featured a mahogany-

lined reception and reference room on the second floor with a twenty-six-

foot-high domed ceiling of stained glass. The immortal names in literature

were engraved on a scroll around the edge of the ceiling. Behind the cir-

cular desk in the middle of the room were two levels of bookshelves, or

open stacks (they are closed today).

In one of the great American ironies—which also accounts for the fund-

ing of the country’s fledgling colleges and universities in the late nineteenth

century—this product of poverty, ignorance, and superstition was uplifted

and educated through the benevolence or “blood money” of one of the

country’s leading financial titans, himself an immigrant and self-made

man. “What pleased and impressed me most about this institution,” Dreiser

remembered, “was its forty or fifty thousand volumes so conveniently

arranged so that one could walk from stack to stack.” Here, while suppos-

edly “on duty” at the courthouse, he frequently hid himself in window

nooks and alcoves furnished with chairs and read book after book. He men-

tions Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, and Dryden, but the writer who impressed

him most in Andrew Carnegie’s first library was Honoré de Balzac. It was

in the several books from La Comédie Humaine he read that spring and sum-

mer that Dreiser thought he had finally discovered the true nature of life—

or its dramatic spectacle. “By the merest chance,” he picked up The Wild

Ass’s Skin and instantly became enamored of the grand master. “Through

him I saw at a glance a prospect so wide that it fairly left me breathless—

all Paris, all France, all life through French eyes, and those of a genius.”

Other romances by Balzac that Dreiser read included The Great Man from

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the Provinces, Père Goriot, Cousin Pons, and Cousin Bette. Perhaps Balzac’s use of “Father” and “Cousin” in his titles in some way suggested the use of

“Sister” in Dreiser’s first novel.23

Dreiser thought that Balzac’s Human Comedy exhausted “every aspect

of the human welter.” He also fancied (in his autobiography, at least, writ-

ten after he had visited Europe) that Pittsburgh, with its many bridges and