The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

“Curious Shifts of the Poor” and his interview with Howells, Dreiser be-

gan Sister Carrie. 29

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Before he immersed himself in the composition of the first Great Amer-

ican Novel of the twentieth century, however, Dreiser experimented with

short stories. He may have already been thinking of himself as a writer of

more than magazine articles when he allowed himself to be described in

the first edition of Who’s Who (1899) not only as a “journalist-author” who

contributes “prose and verse to various periodicals” but as the author of a

book called Studies of Contemporary Celebrities. (Possibly a proposed col-

lection of his Success articles, no such book ever appeared.)30 And, as he

had told Jug, there was that volume of poems slated for the press, though

that too, never materialized. He may have been encouraged to some extent

in the poetic endeavor by Edmund Clarence Stedman; in 1899, Dreiser wrote

a second fawning piece on the “banker-poet” for Munsey’s. (Stedman was

apparently never aware that much of it was plagiarized from a piece in the

Critic thirteen years earlier.)31

It was at Arthur Henry’s urging that Dreiser wrote five or six stories in

the summer of 1899.32 Henry, while back with his wife in Ohio, had in-

vited Dreiser and Jug to join them at the “House of the Four Pillars,” their

summer home on the Maumee River. He hoped that having his soul mate

working by his side would stimulate his own writing—indeed, they might

even write something together. By then Dreiser was living with his bride at

6 West 102nd Street. Arthur, who had literally “camped” in their apartment

for several months before going back home, also proªered the invitation as

a way to repay the hospitality Jug and Ted (as the Henrys called him) had

shown Arthur while he was in New York.33

The Greek Revival mansion had fourteen airy rooms—space and pri-

vacy enough not only for the two couples but for the Henrys’ five-year-old

daughter Dottie. It was the perfect writer’s retreat, far enough from town

to be as quiet as its residents wished. Maude Henry, who had collaborated

with her husband on a collection of fairytales, probably wrote there, too.

(In later life she became the prolific author of short verse for juvenile and

educational magazines.) Jug, the new bride, doted on her “Teddykins” and

did the cooking for the entire household. Arthur and Ted worked all day

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in the basement, either writing separately or arguing this issue or that, and

emerging only in the evening for dinner to notice the ladies. The pipe-smok-

ing Arthur was variously working on either short stories or his second novel,

which became The Princess of Arcady, published in 1900 by the same firm

that issued Sister Carrie. Dreiser probably did not begin his novel, at least

in earnest, until returning to New York that fall. But he may have gotten

the urge to begin it before leaving Maumee, for as he later related, Henry

not only pestered him to write short stories but also began to “ding-dong

about a novel.” It was Henry, Dreiser told H. L. Mencken in 1916, “who

persuaded me to write my first short story. This is literally true. He nagged

until I did, saying he saw short stories in me.”34

Although there is no way of knowing for sure which of the five or six

stories he wrote first, most critics agree that it was most likely “The Shin-

ing Slave Makers,” an allegory in which the protagonist wakes up as an ant

and witnesses the same kind of competition to survive Dreiser had read

about in Darwin. He said it was immediately taken by Ainslee’s (who did

in fact publish the story in 1901). “Nigger Jeª,” also written on the Maumee,

was placed in Ainslee’s as well. This story, too, is in its way about the sur-

vival of the fittest. In fact, all the Maumee stories are. “Butcher Rogaum’s

Door” resembles Crane’s Maggie in that an eighteen-year-old daughter of

a German butcher (like one or another of Dreiser’s adventuresome sisters)

is almost lost to the streets of lower New York and a life of prostitution af-

ter being locked out of the house by her father for staying out too late.

“When the Old Century Was New” combines an idyllic picture of New

York society in the spring of 1801 with a prediction of the formidable crush

of industrialism to come in the new century. Finally, “A Mayor and His

People”—based on an idealistic former mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut,

whom Dreiser had met while on a magazine assignment in the spring of

1898—is about the struggle of the common citizen and taxpayer in the vise

of corporate greed and governmental mismanagement.35 The final story

from this summer mentioned by Dreiser, “The World and the Bubble,”

whose title seems to put it in the same class as the others in terms of the

theme of illusion and reality, has never been found. (There are two essays

in manuscript, both written before the Maumee stories, at the University

of Virginia Library entitled “The Bubble of Success” and “Lying about Suc-

cess” that argue against the American idea that hard work and honesty will

lead everyone to success.)

Dreiser’s earliest stories have been generally slighted in studies of his work,

described in one source as uneven in quality, ranging from almost “worth-

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less” (“When the Old Century Was New”) to powerful (“Nigger Jeª ”).36 It

is true that “When the Old Century Was New” is only a few steps away

from the kind of magazine articles he was writing about American life at

the turn of the coming century, but it joins the others in expressing the un-

easy sense of impending doom or decline that will pervade not only Sister

Carrie but all of Dreiser’s novels. The Maumee stories mark Dreiser’s shift

from the sugar-coated depictions of the surface of American life for such

magazines as Success to clear-eyed portrayals of its underside, where the col-

lateral social damage of “success” is both suggested and interpreted artisti-

cally. Dreiser had been wanting to write more truthfully about life before

he got to the Maumee River, had indeed tried, but the larger magazine world

wasn’t as receptive even as Ev’ry Month had been, with the author as his own

managing editor. There, as noted, he had at least been able to explore around

the edges of American life. ( When years later he published a heavily revised

version of “A Mayor and His People,” he has the narrator say at its close that

he had met the mayor, a former shoemaker by trade—“in other words a fac-

tory shoehand” by the 1890s—while making “a very careful study of his ca-

reer for a current magazine, which, curiously, was never published.”)37

In one sense, Sister Carrie was merely the latest expression of Dreiser’s

need to explore this underside of American life, where hard work didn’t al-

ways pay oª and virtue wasn’t necessarily its own reward. Carrie is an ex-

tension of Theresa of “Butcher Rogaum’s Door,” who also comes close to

perishing in an urban jungle—as well as a reflection of the fact that Dreiser’s

sister Theresa did perish, at a railroad crossing in Chicago in 1897.38 Car-

rie also lives in the New York foreseen a century hence from the romantic

depiction in “When the Old Century Was New.” Broadway will be trans-

formed from “a lane through the woods and fields” into a crowded and face-

less thoroughfare dotted with homeless men waiting in the cold for a bed

for the night. Without stretching the comparison, we might also observe

that life in Sister Carrie is about the same rat race, or ant race, as in “The

Shining Slave Makers.” The only extant story from that summer without

direct echoes in Sister Carrie is “Nigger Jeª ”—and even there the “curious

shifts” of life are rather haunting.

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Dreiser recalled that he wrote “The Shining Slave Makers” one afternoon in

the basement of Four Pillars with Henry nearly standing over him. “After

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every paragraph,” he wrote Mencken, “I blushed for my folly—it seemed so

asinine.” But Henry kept at him, and after it was finally done, he had the

manuscript typed and began to submit it, at first without success. On Oc-

tober 9, 1899, Henry M. Alden of Harper’s told Dreiser that “a large accu-

mulation of short stories prevents me from using ‘Of the Shining Slave Mak-

ers,’”(possibly an indication of its original title).39 Dreiser next sent the story

to the Century, where it was rejected in early January, this time apparently

on the technical grounds that the allegory was scientifically unsound. In an

angry letter to the Century’s editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, on Janu-