anywhere of the man who has lost his grip,” wrote the Seattle Post Intelli-
gencer, “the man who disintegrates utterly in the face of adversity.”
One bright interlude in the publishing history of Sister Carrie occurred
when the English got to read the novel. Through Norris, a copy of the
“banned” book fell into the hands of the British publisher William Heine-
mann, who was getting a series in American fiction under way with his “Dol-
lar Library,” in which a reprint of an American book was published every
month. The book had also been brought to his attention by George A. Brett,
an editor at Macmillan who wrote Dreiser an admiring letter about Sister
Carrie. Heinemann made the oªer of publication through Doubleday on
May 6, 1901. The only requirement for change was that in order for the
book to conform to the length of the other five books already published
Dreiser would have to condense the first two hundred pages down to eighty.
Heinemann had no intention of expurgating or revising the content of the
book, but the end result was to produce a novel with a tighter structure and
one in which the dramatic downfall of Hurstwood is more central to the
overall plot. Henry once again helped his friend edit Sister Carrie, indeed,
may have done the job himself to cut material from the first 195 pages, or
up to Chapter 18, where Hurstwood, out to the theater one night with Car-
rie and Drouet, lies that his wife is ill.46
The revised novel, which appeared in 1901, sold better than the Dou-
bleday edition, exhausting its first printing of 1,500 copies and netting
Dreiser royalties of $150.47 The bigger pay-oª came, however, in the En-
glish reviews, which were much stronger than the American ones. Up un-
til the time of Washington Irving, the English had been condescending
toward American authors, but they had spent the latter half of the nine-
teenth century in condescension toward American critics, who seemed to
overlook everyone of their countrymen who wrote unlike the English, such
as Whitman and Mark Twain. Heinemann suspected a new American
School of writers, perhaps thinking of Crane and Garland, with Dreiser as
its latest head. “At last a really strong novel has come from America,” an-
nounced the London Daily Mail of August 13, 1901; “Dreiser has contrived
a masterpiece.” The Manchester Guardian of the following day wrote,
“Rarely, even in modern work, have we met with characters so little ide-
alised.” The Academy of August 24 readily admitted its ignorance of this
new breed of American writers, “but Sister Carrie has opened our eyes. It
is a calm, reasoned, realistic study of American life, . . . absolutely free from
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 6 2
the slightest traces of sentimentality . . . and dominated everywhere by a
serious and strenuous desire for the truth.” The comparison with Zola in
the Athenaeum of September 7 was quoted in the New York Commercial
Advertiser of September 18, which had already given the original edition
one of its best American reviews. Now the book was hailed as “not only
one of the best novels published last year by Doubleday, Page and Com-
pany, but one of the strongest and best-sustained pieces of fiction that we
have read for a long time.” It also noted that while Sister Carrie was win-
ning “golden opinions” from the British, it had “curiously enough attracted
comparatively little notice in this country.”
–
By the time of the English edition of Sister Carrie, Dreiser had already be-
gun two other new novels. The first, to be called “The Rake,” was the story
of a sexual adventurer and may have been based either on his sexual ex-
ploits as a newspaperman or possibly a “rake” like Frank Cowperwood of
The Financier. Perhaps fearing the subject oªensive to the publishing in-
dustry, he turned instead on New Year’s Day 1901 to write Jennie Gerhardt,
originally entitled The Transgressor. Richard Lingeman speculates that it was
his father’s death a week earlier that prompted this novel, based not only
on another sister but on his father and mother. He wrote up to forty chap-
ters, then tore up all but the first fifteen, before he ran out of gas. He was
emotionally exhausted and began to brood. It was as if his world had come
to an end with the old century, collapsing on the eve of the new in a re-
versal of William Walton’s prospects in his short story “When the Old Cen-
tury Was New.” Young Walton has “no inkling” of what the century might
bring forth, but he is naively optimistic. His creator could see only “the
crush and stress and wretchedness fast treading upon his path.”48 In fact,
Dreiser was almost fatally intertwined with his fictional characters and the
sense of impending doom that frequently envelops them—so much so that
the author of Sister Carrie began to turn into the gloomy Hurstwood.
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 6 3
e i g h t
Down Hill and Up
–
Hurstwood moved on, wondering. The sight of the large, bright
coin pleased him a little. He remembered that he was hungry and
that he could get a bed for ten cents. With this, the idea of death
passed, for the time being, out of his mind. It was only when he
could get nothing but insults that death seemed worth while.
S I S T E R C A R R I E
the doubleday f i asco wasn’t the only reason for Dreiser’s low
mood. His nervous breakdown had been looming for the last decade. Es-
sentially, he never fully recovered from his mother’s death. He had recre-
ated her in Sister Carrie, to the extent that Carrie is a dreamer destined to
be disappointed. But by now Dreiser had generalized the idea of her tragic
existence into the belief that all life was slated for disappointment. How
could it be otherwise? There might be order on the cosmic level, but surely
not on the human, where change ultimately meant disappointment and
death to the individual. Not only had Dreiser’s own life led him to this
view, but he stood as the heir to a chain of nineteenth-century logocen-
tric thought ultimately overturned or at least challenged by Darwin’s fa-
mous study of the species. As the last major American writer of the nine-
teenth century, Dreiser had also sought order in the chaos of experience
but ultimately fell victim to the relativism of the approaching twentieth
century.
There was also the challenge of continuing to make a living in the wake
of the Sister Carrie debacle. Dreiser had let his magazine work slide dur-
ing the composition of his novel, and he wasn’t in any mood to return to
such hack work in the spring of 1901. In March he had borrowed $100
from Richard Duªy of Ainslee’s, where he was still on the rolls as a con-
tributor.1 He spent the month of July with Arthur Henry and Anna Mal-
1 6 4
lon on one of the dumpling islands oª Connecticut, opposite Noank be-
tween New London and Stonington. This was the island Anna had pur-
chased for $300 —about a half acre of grasslands and a cabin whose con-
struction Henry (with Anna’s money) had arranged. Professing to live on
two dollars a week, Henry, Anna, and her maid had set out in May to com-
mune with nature. (Actually, Anna’s companion, Brigitte Seery, served as
a “chaperone” for Arthur and Anna, who would not marry until 1903.)2
Despite Henry’s romantic descriptions of the island, it was clearly a rough
paradise. Naturally, everything was damp from the ocean air, including
the pallets on the floor used for beds. At first the only stove for cooking
was a fireplace, which blackened not only the pots and pans but the faces
of those doing the cooking. For drinking water, they had to pull a large
barrel with their rowboat the half-mile or so across the ship’s channel to
Noank and back. Frequently, the island and its tiny cabin were battered
by rain.
While Anna and Brigitte were back in New York temporarily, Dreiser ar-
rived as the serpent in Henry’s Eden. For what actually happened on the
island, we have two dueling accounts. The first is Henry’s description of a
petulant Dreiser (called “Tom”) in An Island Cabin, a book that would heav-
ily damage their friendship. The other is Dreiser’s revenge more than a quar-
ter of a century later: the sketch “Rona Murtha” in A Gallery of Women
(1929), in which Henry (called “Winnie”) is depicted as a self-serving ro-
mantic who takes advantage of women who love him. Certainly, Dreiser was
unprepared for nature’s austerity after the jolts and disappointments over
his first novel. He admits in “Rona Murtha” that he was not “spiritually