frustration and feelings of helplessness, Dreiser walked over to City Hall
Park. There he stared back at the great buildings of the newspapers that
had ignored him and then around at the bedraggled company in the park.
“About me on the benches of the Park was—even in this grey, chill De-
cember weather—that same large company of ‘benchers’ so frequently de-
scribed as bums, loafers, tramps, idlers—the flotsam and jetsam of the great
city’s whirl and strife,” he recalled. He thought of his chances of becoming
one of them, then of his sister’s dilemma and the spectacle of the once suc-
cessful Hopkins. The city seemed so heartless and cruel. “And it was then,”
he wrote, “if ever, that the idea of Hurstwood was born.”44
–
He returned to Emma’s warm apartment, his long face all too clearly re-
vealing his day. This was the first of several periods in Dreiser’s life in
which—like the ill-fated Hurstwood—he felt the pull of a serious depres-
sion over the downward turns of fate. Now he took refuge in a rocking chair
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
9 0
and fretted. He was nearing the brink of an emotional abyss that would
temporarily overwhelm him before another decade was out. Emma tried
to cheer him up, saying that New York wasn’t as bad as he feared and that
Paul had said he was a talented writer. Surely, he would find a newspaper
job here.
He resolved to try the World again, the paper that had most interested
him. The next day, after another false start, he barged past the sentries into
the editorial room, which was full of tobacco smoke and reporters: “most
of them in shirt sleeves, a number of them operating typewriters or writ-
ing by hand, and in many instances smoking.”45 As the two watchdogs
caught up with him, a young man of apparent authority intervened. Dreiser
insisted that he needed a job, that he had worked as a reporter in the West—
and he was hired on the spot, as a space-rate reporter at $7.50 per column.
Dreiser’s angel in this instance was Arthur Brisbane, then managing editor
of the World and soon to become editor of Pulitzer’s main competition in
the world of “yellow journalism,” William Randolph Hearst’s New York
Evening Journal.
Dreiser had gotten lucky, but this upturn wouldn’t last long. Although
he survived the customary “vacant lot” assignment to a graveyard in Eliz-
abeth, New Jersey, he failed to make a living wage on the newspaper. He
resented the privileges of the regular reporters, for he had to put in the
same number of hours, which in his case ran till three in the morning. Ac-
tually, many more reporters than Dreiser realized worked on “space,” but
they were toughened veterans of Pulitzer’s rat race and many made decent
livings. (Stephen Crane and Lincoln Steªens had also made their living as
“space” reporters before Dreiser, as they honed their writing skills toward
literature.)46
But New York, with its overworked charities, bedhouses (rooms let out
to prostitutes by the hour or day), streetwalkers, and run-down tenements,
threatened his will to succeed. He felt that the world must be arranged diªer-
ently in the minds of his competition, for everyone around him seemed to
miss the pathos of so many down-and-out victims of the economic de-
pression that winter. “How was a sniveling scribbler such as myself to make
his way in a world such as this?” he asked himself. Whenever he went out
on an assignment, usually the most trivial, whose “facts” he wasn’t even al-
lowed to write up himself, he remembered, “I carried with me this sense of
my immense unimportance, fortified by what I had read in Spencer and
what I saw here.”47 In the meantime, his Pittsburgh savings had begun to
disappear as he helped his sister with household expenses. (There is no ev-
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
9 1
idence that Emma was unreasonable in her needs, but the situation may
have laid the seed for the exploitation of Carrie when she first lives with
her sister and brother-in-law in Chicago, or during her time in New York
with the run-down Hurstwood.)
There are only four World articles attributed to Dreiser in the collected
journalism, and none of them is dated beyond February 16, 1895. The grim-
ness of their subjects probably didn’t surpass what he had written about in
Pittsburgh, but now Dreiser wasn’t that far away from the pitiful condi-
tion of many of those he reported. One piece dated December 13 was about
“disorderly women,” or prostitutes, in the tenements similar to Emma’s
place on West Fifteenth Street. Another focused on tenement violence. A
third concerned a woman named Emma who, like Crane’s Maggie, died
“a daughter of the slums.” The fourth, interestingly enough, was about a
“shabbily dressed man” who took his life the same way Hurstwood does
in Sister Carrie. 48
Readers of that novel in 1900 were shocked that Dreiser, while punish-
ing Hurstwood with death, left Carrie unpunished (if also unfulfilled) at
the close of his novel. What was truly shocking, however, in the words of
Robert Penn Warren, “was not so much the things he presented as the fact
that he himself was not shocked by them.”49 His formative years, as we have
seen, had been full of Hurstwoods and Carries. Dreiser was the first great
American novelist from the wrong side of town. His fictions about the so-
cial brutality of life had none of the “redeeming” features of the work of
his fellow naturalists such as Crane and Frank Norris.
In both Crane’s Maggie and Norris’s McTeague (1899), for example, the
main characters are flawed enough to be blamed for their own downfalls.
Crane depicts the Irish of the East Side as hopeless brutes. And Norris al-
most laughs through his narrative about the working-class immigrants on
Polk Street in San Francisco. It is no wonder that William Dean Howells,
whose own realistic fictions nevertheless subscribed to Victorian standards
of timidity and gentility, disliked Sister Carrie, while at the same time en-
couraging the work of both Crane and Norris.50 He believed—even after
having his eyes opened by the police riots in Haymarket Square in 1886—
in the principles of Social Darwinism in which the “moral” prove to be the
most likely candidates for survival. In his view, Carrie and Hurstwood, whose
social status suggests only a one- or two-generation remove from immigrant
status, no more deserve to be saved from themselves than the genetically de-
fective Irish in Maggie and McTeague. The important diªerence was that
Crane and Norris shared Howells’s belief in the moral superiority of a cer-
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
9 2
tain class, mainly Anglo-American. Dreiser, on the other hand, as the son
of an immigrant, did not. For him, man—all of humankind—was still only
halfway between animal instinct and the ideal of human morality, and so a
lack of humanity was to be expected.
Evidence close at hand that winter of man’s hopelessly amoral condition
was the fifty-year-old Hopkins, who had become unfaithful both to Emma
and to the idea of supporting their two children. For some years, before
Dreiser’s arrival, the couple had operated a prostitution ring out of their
own apartment on West Fifteenth Street. Because they had returned most
of the money Hopkins had stolen to finance his running away with Emma,
he had persuaded her that prostitution was their “swiftest road to for-
tune. . . . As easy, unmoral money began to roll in E[mma] indulged in furs,
jewels, and gaudy knick-knacks in the way of furniture and household dec-
oration. Carriage rides in the park were her daily delight. Believing herself
safely placed in the matter of love and fortune she indulged in the luxury
of two children which long before she had learned how to prevent.” In the
printed text of Dawn, this information is replaced by the assertion that
Emma was shocked at the idea of renting out their rooms to prostitutes
when it was brought up during her brother’s visit. But Emma—the model
for Sister Carrie—may have briefly been a prostitute herself in Chicago be-
fore meeting Hopkins. Dreiser opines in another suppressed section of
Dawn that while in Chicago she “was obviously selling her virtue for cash,”
quickly adding that she “subsequently fell in love [with Hopkins] and made
tremendous sacrifices for her children,” which was true.51
Emma was still in love with Hopkins after ten years together, but at the
same time she was afraid he would someday hurt her or their children in a
fit of despair. Eventually, she agreed to her brother’s plan to escape her brood-