The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

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

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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

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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