The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

reer on Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and his translation of Goethe’s

Faust (his only truly lasting work), Taylor, who had died in 1878, was al-

ready being forgotten two decades into America’s second hundred years.

“When men who are now fifty years old were boys,” the admiring Dreiser

wrote, “there was not a youth in the country who did not know of Bayard

Taylor and hope to do as he had done.” Dreiser admired Taylor most for

his impoverished beginning, “that he was a poor lad who had earned his

own way.”13

This Horatio Alger scenario still appealed to Dreiser, who was also earn-

ing his own way and whose early articles suggest that he aspired to some of

the respectability Taylor and the scribblers of Lawrence Park had achieved.

The future chronicler of not only Hurstwood’s fall but also Cowperwood’s

rise to wealth was not opposed to popular literary success per se. In an es-

say called “The Homes of Longfellow,” which was written about this time

but never published, he begrudged the most popular poet of the nineteenth

century neither his privileged beginning in life (saying that it kept him

“mindful of duty”) nor his commercial success (which “stimulated him to

toil”).14 Yet Dreiser could not sustain this generosity towards the rich as he

approached Sister Carrie.

What probably changed this course, broke its nostalgic trance, were the

thirty articles Dreiser wrote for Success, a magazine that featured interviews

with and stories about those who had recently “arrived”—successful men

of business, industry, science, art, and literature . First issued in January 1898,

Dr. Orison Swett Marden’s publication sought to demonstrate that char-

acter, energy, and endless ambition were the only keys to success in a land

t h e w r i t e r

1 2 0

where all men were born free and equal. Its articles were structured by three

basic questions concerning the essential quality of success (inevitably in-

dustry); where or at what level the achievers began in life (inevitably poor);

and the definition of the successful person’s concept of happiness (almost

inevitably that hard work was its own best reward). Naturally, the stock an-

swers were narcoleptic to any but the most avid believers in the formula

“success.”15 But it was not simply the monotony of the American Dream

that pushed Dreiser towards the new realism, or the naturalism of Sister

Carrie. It was the suspicion in interviewing all these people that the picture

of life in the ideal, even the democratic ideal of hard work and fair play,

was a sham.

One question Dreiser usually added to the battery of stock queries

touched on the debate, fueled by the rise of Social Darwinism, over

whether ability was inherited or acquired. By the time of Sister Carrie, or

in its disastrous aftermath, Dreiser was convinced that his writing talent

was inherent, not taught or learned. Edison, whom he interviewed in Feb-

ruary 1898, reinforced his suspicions about heredity and environment. When

the most famous American of his day insisted that the talent to improve

technology “is born in a man,” Dreiser asked whether familiarity with “cer-

tain mechanical conditions and defects” might not suggest improvements

to anyone. No, the inventor answered, some people might be perfectly fa-

miliar with the machinery and never see a way to improve it. The slaugh-

terhouse and meat-packing king Philip D. Armour agreed when Dreiser

interviewed him in Chicago that June.16 Yet the very raison d’être of the

magazine in which these interviews were to appear was to tell Americans

that life was an even playing field. Its theme of success and self-help also

ignored the role of chance, not only in terms of inherited ability but op-

portunity. “It never occurred to me at the time,” Dreiser wrote in an un-

dated manuscript probably from the 1920s, “that nearly everybody was noth-

ing more than a minor point in a huge organism, and that the part of it in

which one found oneself might oªer very serious objections to the achieve-

ment of a great financial or mental success.”17 But obviously, it had occurred

to him, for both Edison and Armour had explained to him that their suc-

cess depended mainly on native intelligence and the right opportunity, or

essentially chance. For Edison, his wizardly understanding of electricity sur-

faced not long after he saved the son of a station master who in gratitude

gave him a job on the railroad and taught him how to operate a telegraph

machine, while for Armour achievement owed its success to the growth of

t h e w r i t e r

1 2 1

the cattle market and the outbreak of the Civil War, which produced enor-

mous demands for pork and beef.

–

By now Dreiser was convinced that he had a talent to write, but he must

have asked himself if or when it was going to intersect with the right op-

portunity. He was working as hard as had any of the men he interviewed,

traveling to the Midwest, New England, and Pennsylvania on freelance as-

signments. He was writing now not only for Success but such other ten-cent

magazines as Cosmopolitan, Demorest’s, McClure’s, Metropolitan, Munsey’s,

Pearson’s, Puritan, Truth, and Ainslee’s, whose editor, Richard Duªy, would

become a lifelong friend. Between the fall of 1897 and the fall of 1900, when

Sister Carrie appeared, he had in print almost one hundred articles; another

eleven would appear before 1902. Many of these subscribed to the con-

ventional values of hard work, with success as its inevitable reward. He was

also writing and publishing his own poetry, which the McClure’s Syndicate

may have tentatively agreed to publish in book form. “I am hard at work

now, for us,” he told Jug in July 1898, “and hope the day is not far oª when

you can join me.”18 He had arranged to visit her in Missouri that spring

while on his trip to Chicago to interview not only Armour, but Robert Lin-

coln of the Pullman Company and the department-store king Marshall

Field. In the continuing vein of uncritical success stories, his article on the

model town of Pullman, just outside Chicago, oªered bland praise for this

worker’s paradise in which—he somehow failed to mention—employees

(mostly immigrants) could own no property and could be evicted on ten

days’ notice for any conduct considered immoral. To its credit, however,

the state of Pullman did seem the diametric opposite of the conditions

Dreiser had seen at Homestead in 1894, and other “bleak mining and milling

villages which now disgrace our national domain.” He described Field as

“the celebrated Western merchant, sprung from rugged Eastern soil, whose

career is an example to be studied with profit by every farmer boy, by every

o‹ce boy, by every clerk and artisan.”19

Seeing Jug had renewed his excitement about her and helped numb his

fears about marriage. For months before his visit, he had poured out his

love, or lust, in letters to his “tempestuous little creature.” For her part, Jug

was growing impatient after almost five years. “You make me feel criminal,

truly,” he told her, “when you mourn so in words.” He was weary of his

t h e w r i t e r

1 2 2

“Bohemian existence . . . of restaurants and hotel dinners” and longed for

“a cozy flat” for the two of them somewhere in New York. “I have not the

slightest idea of how much it would cost. Flats run here from $15 to $200

a month, so you can see the range they cover,” and there was the furniture,

either to be purchased or rented. He wished there “were houses already fur-

nished for lovers” and suggested teasingly that he should “keep house with

some maiden here for a few months” to learn the domestic routine. He wor-

ried then, as he would most of his life, about money, but he was making

it, or beginning to. Dreiser would earn by his own estimate up to $5,000

a year as a freelancer.20

From his Fifteenth Street room, he told her later that summer, his view

had “the sweep of a number of open rear windows, . . . and in these rooms

dwell a number of lovely maidens. They are unconscious of my existence

and the summer heat seems to make them reckless.” Alternately scared of

marriage and awash in sexual fantasies about her, he told Jug that he hadn’t

witnessed “such a display of beauty” since his days at the World’s Fair where

they had met. “Man is ever an iniquitous beast—don’t you think? I sup-

pose I am criminal in thus employing my time admiring such loveliness at

a distance.” But he blamed his voyeurism in part on her and wished they

were already together in the state of marriage and connubial bliss. Earlier

he had sent her Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Stream’s Secret,” which speaks

of being “Beneath her sheltering hair, / In the warm silence near her breast.”