became the object of Hawthorne’s sermon and final scolding remarks
(through Dimmesdale), just as she was the object of the minister’s sermon
on sin on the scaªold at the beginning of the story. As we shall see, by the
time Dreiser had finally written the novel he indicated to Henry he couldn’t
write, he was prepared to do almost anything to see it in print.
–
Once the typescript had been initially edited and its changes spliced in,
Dreiser asked Henry Alden of Harper’s Monthly to read it and advise as to
its chances of publication. Alden had sent him a kind letter of rejection
for “The Shining Slave Makers,” and Harper’s had just published his arti-
cle on the railroad. Furthermore, Alden frequently read book manuscripts
for the well-established publishing house of Harper and Brothers. Alden
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 5 2
told Dreiser it was a capable piece of work and ought to be published, but
he doubted whether any publisher would touch it because of the reigning
standards of decency. Nevertheless, no doubt at Dreiser’s urging, Alden
passed the typescript on to Harper and Brothers, who, as Dreiser remem-
bered in his letter to Mencken about the aªair, “promptly rejected [it] with
a sharp slap.” Actually, the reader’s report he received from the firm was
not a flat-out rejection, but in the first half at least an able and accurate
assessment, which finally devolved into a vague argument as to why
Harper’s dare not publish it.25
In the report dated May 2, 1900, the unknown reader or readers called
it “a superior piece of reportorial realism— of highclass newspaper work,
such as might have been done by George Ade.” This may have been part
of the “slap,” but “reportorial realism” had already been published not only
by Crane (albeit privately) but by Garland and even Howells in A Haz-
ard of New Fortunes. The report continued to note Dreiser’s “many ele-
ments of strength—it is graphic, the local color is excellent, the portrayal
of certain below-the-surface life in the Chicago of twenty years ago faith-
ful to fact.” Furthermore, it found “chapters that reveal very keen insight
into this phase of life and incidents that disclose a sympathetic apprecia-
tion of the motives of the characters of the story.” It seems clear that in
declining to publish Sister Carrie Harper’s made a commercial—and
moral—decision, not an aesthetic one. The negative side of the report is
less exact in making its arguments, such as the statement that “the author
has not risen to the standard necessary for the e‹cient handling of the
theme.” The key to their true meaning here comes in the statement that
Dreiser’s “touch is neither firm enough nor su‹ciently delicate to depict
without oªense to the reader [i.e., ‘feminine readers who control the des-
tinies of so many novels’] the continued illicit relations of the heroine.”
Its parting shot took aim at the alleged weariness of parts of the plot
(mainly dealing with Carrie, since the report admired the section on Hurst-
wood’s decline) and Dreiser’s uneven or colloquial style.26 The matter of
that “style” would dog him throughout his lifetime—as well as his liter-
ary reputation today.
It has been said that Dreiser was crushed by the letter, believing he had
written a novel in the tradition of Balzac and Hardy (which he had), but
Alden had warned Dreiser that his inclusion of illicit sexual relations would
not be tolerated. Dreiser later described himself at the time as being “as
green as grass about such matters, totally unsophisticated.” He promptly
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 5 3
took Alden’s advice to try the newer firm of Doubleday and Page—recently
reorganized from the firm of Doubleday and McClure, which had pub-
lished in 1899 a novel almost as challenging to the standards of decency,
Frank Norris’s McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. 27
Before he did so, Sister Carrie very likely went through another round of
revisions, this time to cut out or moderate the oªensive parts of the book.
Henry, whose novel was already in press at Doubleday, was the logical choice
for the job. Once this work was done, Dreiser took the typescript to the
o‹ces of Doubleday and Page at 34 Union Square and personally handed
it to Frank Doubleday. He remembered that Doubleday looked at him “with
a kind of condescending, examining smirk.” The publisher had a big ego,
too big for his former partner Sam McClure (who after their split had
formed the house of McClure and Phillips). When he left McClure, Dou-
bleday had taken Walter Hines Page and Frank Norris with him as part of
his editorial staª.28 He now turned over the typescript either to his part-
ner Page or directly to Norris, because he himself was getting ready to go
abroad with his wife.
About a week later, Jug’s sister Rose White, who was visiting, raved to
her brother-in-law about McTeague. Dreiser read it and admired it im-
mensely. “It made a great hit with me and I talked of nothing else for
months,” he later told Mencken. “It was the first real American book I had
ever read—and I had read quite a number by W. D. Howells and others.”
At almost the same time, Frank Norris was reading Sister Carrie in a cabin
resort in Greenwich, Connecticut, and coming to an equally enthusiastic
conclusion about Dreiser’s decidedly American book. Although his reader’s
report is unfortunately lost, he wrote directly to Dreiser that “it was the
best novel I had read in M.S. since I had been reading for the firm, and
that it pleased me as well as any novel I have read in any form, published
or otherwise.”29 If events had played out diªerently, we might be celebrat-
ing this literary intersection as another “shock of recognition” such as what
Melville experienced when he crossed paths with Hawthorne or Emerson
when he greeted Whitman “at the beginning of a great career.”
But there were other players, not only Doubleday, but the second reader
on Dreiser’s submission, Henry Lanier, the firm’s junior partner. While he
joined Norris in recommending Sister Carrie, Lanier evidently had his reser-
vations about the potential risks to the firm’s reputation. For the time be-
ing, however, he kept them to himself. Meanwhile Page, who acted as third
reader, liked the book almost as much as Norris. He wrote to Dreiser on
June 9, “As, we hope, Mr. Norris has informed you, we are very much pleased
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 5 4
with your novel.” Congratulating him “on so good a piece of work,” Page
invited the author to come down to their o‹ces the following Monday af-
ternoon. Dreiser’s prospects couldn’t have looked better, and after the meet-
ing he felt confident enough about them to leave town and accompany his
wife back to Missouri to see her family.
It was about this time—between mid-June and early July—that Frank
Doubleday returned from Europe. Just what happened isn’t clear, even to
this day. Allegedly, Doubleday took the typescript home and shared the en-
thusiastic reports of the book with his wife, whom Dreiser later described
as “a social worker and active in moral reform.” According to legend, Mrs.
Doubleday read the typescript and strongly advised her husband not to pub-
lish it. Mrs. Doubleday’s role in the aªair, however, has never been verified;
all accounts of her involvement as Mrs. Grundy come from Dreiser, who
told the story at various points in his life.30 The actual villain and possibly
the catalyst to Doubleday’s decision to try to get out of the firm’s oral
agreement with Dreiser may have been Henry Lanier, whom Arthur Henry
described to Dreiser on July 14 as “a good deal of a cad . . . [who] knows
nothing at all about real life . . . [and] is exceedingly conceited.”
Since Dreiser was still in Missouri, Henry had gone to see Lanier at Nor-
ris’s suggestion when the process for publishing Dreiser’s book had sud-
denly and mysteriously stalled. During the interview, he and Lanier had
engaged in “a warm argument” over the value of Dreiser’s realism in Sis-
ter Carrie. Lanier insisted that Dreiser was unnecessarily “straining after
realism.” Interestingly, this had been the same argument his late father,
the poet Sidney Lanier, had used against Walt Whitman in The English
Novel and the Principle of Its Development (1883), where he objected to
Whitman’s depiction of the “rough” as the ideal or average American. The
senior Lanier also stood for form in poetry, thinking “free verse” no more
preferable than political anarchy.31 It appears that Henry Lanier shared
this tradition in literature with his father, objecting to Dreiser’s focus on
the average American who falls short of the ideal in sentimental literature.
He could have stomached his colleague Norris’s characters in McTeague