window, where some latest gew-gaw is to show, nothing being quite too
trifling to fail to attract some one idler.”19
Dreiser may well have been aware that Whitman had started his great
literary career as an editorialist, writing his catalogs of Broadway and New
York in the Aurora in the 1840s, for by 1895 the Walt Whitman Fellowship,
headed by Horace Traubel of Philadelphia, was already holding its publi-
cized annual meetings in New York. These “Whitmaniacs” were generally
socialists who subscribed to largely impractical panaceas such as Henry
George’s “Single Tax” (which Whitman himself admired as romantic folly).
Their political agenda would have attracted Dreiser, whose imagination kept
coming back to those bleak Bowery scenes he witnessed almost daily. In
the June 1896 issue, he asked whether it was better to be “a strong man with
average knowledge or a weak man [physically speaking ] with great knowl-
edge.” In other words perhaps, whether to be of the people or about them.
In defining the first, Dreiser drew—almost verbatim—from Whitman’s “I
Sing the Body Electric” about the octogenarian father of five sons, which
came right out of Whitman’s Long Island background to surface in the first
edition of Leaves of Grass:
e d i t o r i a l d a y s
1 0 4
Emma Dreiser, the model for “Sister Carrie.”
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania)
Sara Schänäb Dreiser: “It always
seemed to me that no one ever wanted
me enough, unless it was my mother.”
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Dreiser’s father, John Paul, in Rochester,
New York, not long before his death
in 1900. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Dreiser’s first lesson in writing, from Thomas E. Hill,
Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms: Guide to
Correct Writing (Chicago: Moses, Warren and Co., 1880).
Dreiser (back row sitting, fourth from left) with members of the spelunking
club at Indiana University, 1890. (Lilly Library, Indiana University)
The Chicago family residence on Flourney Street where Dreiser’s
mother died in 1890. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
The Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh—where Dreiser first read Balzac.
(Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania)
Dreiser (center) with Richard Duªy (third from left) and others in 1897.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
A typical cover for one of the magazines in which Dreiser
frequently published in the late 1890s. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Paul Dresser, author of
“On the Banks of the Wabash,”
in The Metropolitan Magazine
for November 1900.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Arthur Henry in Toledo, Ohio, shortly
before the publication of Sister Carrie.
(Lilly Library, Indiana University)
Frank Norris, a champion for Sister Carrie.
(Library of Congress)
The first page of the typesetting copy of Sister Carrie,
with corrections. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Arthur Henry’s A Princess of Arcady and Sister Carrie,
both published by Doubleday in 1900. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
“Paradise Lost”— one of the dumpling islands oª the coast of Connecticut,
where Dreiser visited Arthur Henry in 1901. (Frontispiece for An Island Cabin,
New York: McClure, Phillips, and Company, 1902)
William Muldoon’s Sanitarium in Olympia, New York, where
Dreiser was a patient in 1903. (Edward Van Every, Muldoon:
The Solid Man [New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1929])
Peter McCord’s caricature of Dreiser in 1907, when Dreiser
had his appendix removed. McCord was the basis for “Peter”
in Twelve Men. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Sara Osborne White (“Jug”), Dreiser’s first wife, around 1912.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Dreiser as magazine editor, around 1908.
(Lilly Library, Indiana University)
H. L. Mencken in 1913, at the height
of his friendship with Dreiser.
(Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore)
Thelma Cudlipp around 1910.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
The love of Dreiser’s life: Kirah Markham
(Elaine Hyman). (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons,
And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.
This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were massive,
clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome,
They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him,
They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love,
He drank water only, the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-
brown skin of his face.
“Here is the strong man, say, the common farmer and father of five sons,”
Dreiser wrote. “Here he is, a man of wonderful vigor, calmness, and beauty
of person. . . . He is six feet tall, he is over eighty years of age, his sons are
massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced and handsome. They, and his daughters
love him . . . , not by allowance but with a personal love. He drinks water
only, and through the clear, brown skin of his face his pure blood shows
scarlet.”20
In his sketch, Dreiser also borrowed Whitman’s frequent contrast between
the individual who goes with nature’s flow (like the poet) and the uptight,
over-socialized, and often dyspeptic types whose book learning proves iso-
lating.21 Dreiser insisted that there was “no happy medium.” As a devel-
oping novelist, he suspected that Whitman’s literary success came from his
realistic treatment of life, based on living life instead of merely reading about
it—and its social stereotypes and hierarchies. He thought Balzac’s immer-
sion in life had done the same thing for his art.
In fact, Dreiser paid Balzac the same compliment he gave to Whitman.
In the May 1896 issue, he as boldly plagiarized a passage from The Wild
Ass’s Skin, concerning the dreamy youth who hopes to enter society and a
world of wealth by winning the hand of “some bright, dashing, beautiful
and wealthy girl.” Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine was as real in its depic-
tions as Whitman was of his roughs in Leaves of Grass. In fact, as he had
first struggled on the World, Dreiser couldn’t get out of his mind the fail-
ures he had read about in Balzac, who knew “how pitifully they slave for
fame.” “More than one young man dreams of a brilliant future in these
sharply contrasted days of business,” he wrote in Ev’ry Month by way of
introducing the Balzacian paradigm which he himself felt he was still act-
ing out. “There is many a brilliant young nobody, who at twenty-six years
e d i t o r i a l d a y s
1 0 5
old imagines that he is dying unrecognized because he had not attained
fame.”22
–
This was certainly a self-portrait of the twenty-six-year-old editor of Ev’ry
Month, who still fantasized about wealth through marriage, even as he
poured out his heart to his “Darling Honey Girl” back in Missouri. “If you
knew . . . ,” he wrote Jug, “how my heart has ached only to see your face
once more.” He had made a second visit to see her, in the spring of 1896.
On the way back from Montgomery City to St. Louis in the rain, he wrote
her that “the landscape, towns and structures” were bare and dismal with-
out her.23 That summer he sent her an engagement ring, along with the
latest issue of his magazine. “By the way,” he asked, “did you receive the
July [1896] no? I put your name on the cover as usual. You’re the book’s
mascot.”24 The Ev’ry Month covers had the table of contents superimposed
on the picture of a beautiful actress (usually gazing upward), and invari-
ably one of the authors listed was “S. J. White.”
Having sought to possess her sexually, as he had in the summer of 1894,
he had returned east again in defeat. At least he could write suggestive let-
ters that slyly invited her to give another thought to doing the great deed,
pages and half pages that Jug (or her heirs) cut from his letters. “Oh, my
own Jug! What a lover you are. You are Sapphic in your fire. You love as I
never dreamed a woman could”—with the rest of the paragraph on the
next page missing. In another letter he called her his “repentant Magda-
lene,” but alas with the qualifier that Jug was “Magdalenic in sentiment”
only. This particular comment came, he said, from a photograph of an ac-
tress posing as the “Parisian ‘Chanteuse’ [Cleo de Merade] who enslaved
the King of Belgium.” It was his only picture, he hinted, of Jug on the thresh-
old of sex. “I look at it and it recalls the evenings in St. Louis when you
unbound your splendid hair and coaxed me to kiss you.”25
–
Dreiser now lived in a room at 232 West Fifteenth Street and took many of
his meals at the Continental Hotel, whose cafe windows looked out on
Broadway. “The crowd, street cars, vehicles and pedestrians all tend to dis-