ing gang of Gorillas.” At the end of August, Dreiser joined Mike Burke’s
masonry crew, which was based at Spuyten Duyvil and serviced operations
between New York City and fifty miles out on three railroad divisions. For
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the remainder of 1903, Dreiser worked on Burke’s twelve-man crew of Ital-
ian immigrants (“nagurs,” according to Burke) as it built concrete platforms,
sidewalks, culverts—anything, as Dreiser eventually noted in a sketch of
Burke, “that could be made out of crushed stone and cement, or bricks and
stone.” Since he could not perform the heavy lifting the toughened crew
undertook, he became Burke’s clerical assistant, keeping tabs on material
ordered for each job—paperwork the Irish foreman-mason considered a
necessary nuisance.36
F. O. Matthiessen and others have viewed Burke as Dreiser’s salvation at
this point in his career because of the example the foreman set for persist-
ence in the face of life’s obstacles. At first, Dreiser viewed Burke as a bully,
but he soon came to see that the foreman’s verbal abuse of his crew of Si-
cilians was mainly aªectionate bluster. His men felt no threat whatever, and
in fact loved the gruª Irishman for his paternal interest in them. In 1924,
in an essay for Hearst’s International entitled “The Irish Section Foreman
Who Taught Me How to Live,” Dreiser recalled that this illiterate foreman’s
example had been a source of strength and encouragement as he determined
to return to the world of literature:
This is the attitude and this is the man—and his policy and his viewpoint
are mine from this day forth. I will not whine and I will not tremble any-
more, come what may. I may not be able to write or win in my own field,
but I will be able to do something somewhere, and that will have to be
enough—will have to do. For by the living God, this man and his men in
their way are as happy and useful as any and as good as any.
Because there exist several conflicting versions of the Burke story, it is risky
to base biographical assertions too firmly on the relationship. But it may
be significant that Dreiser wrote this statement about Burke’s character and
the inspiration it gave him in 1924 as he was writing An American Tragedy
and found himself stymied by indecision several times over how to launch
the tale.37
–
Dreiser retired as “an amateur laborer” in December 1903, bidding good-
bye to Mike Burke and his crew on Christmas Eve. He literally wrote him-
self out of “the workaday world” with An Amateur Laborer during the win-
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1 7 8
ter and spring of 1904. The progress of his life, he noted in one of the frag-
mentary parts of the manuscript, which he never published himself but
mined for other work, had been “in the main filled with commonplace, or-
dinary human beings, and yet hemmed about and colored by such con-
trasts of poverty and luxury, such a world of beauty and indiªerence that
even now, as I write it, my eyes all but filled and I am filled with emotions
too deep for words.” Shortly before turning to An Amateur Laborer, he had
written an article called “The Toil of the Laborer,” which was turned down
first by McClure’s and then by five other magazines; it was finally published
in the New York Call, a socialist news sheet, on July 13, 1913. Here he wrote
of what he had learned from the manual laborer, whose fate he had shared
for eight months. “Working with day laborers and attempting to do what
work they did,” he later recalled, “I gradually began to realize the immense
gulf which lies between the man who is an ordinary born and bred work-
ing man of the pick and shovel and the one who is not.”38
During his time in the labor pool, Dreiser had kept up some of his con-
tacts with the literary world, mainly through Duªy, in the hope of return-
ing in some way to the world of writing. Yet it was Paul who once again
came to the rescue—even though his own situation was increasingly un-
certain. By this time, he was a full partner in the sheet music business, and
he and Howley had bought out Haviland. This, however, was the begin-
ning of the end financially. During the fall of 1903 Paul had already been
moonlighting to keep afloat and was writing a vaudevillian farce with
Robert H. Davis, the editor of the New York Daily News. Knowing that the
paper was getting ready to launch a Sunday supplement, Paul requested that
Davis promise to hire Dreiser after the first of the year.39 So it was on the
strength of Davis’s word to Paul that Dreiser finally left the railroad, and
he and Jug moved to 399 Mott Avenue in the Bronx.
Dreiser started writing for the Daily News supplement in January, but
that feature of the paper was canceled by June 1904, and his record of pub-
lications there suggests his job was only part-time. He was barely back in
any game of writing, doing pieces based on his experience with the rail-
road, many of which did not find publication until many years later, in
either The Color of a Great City (1923) or Chains (1927), both omnium-
gatherums published by Boni and Liveright. His “Just What Happened
When the Waters of the Hudson Broke into the North River Tunnel” ap-
peared in the Daily News on January 27. This report on the travails of con-
structing the Holland Tunnel became the basis of one of his best short sto-
ries, “St. Columba and the River.” Two months later, on March 27, the
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supplement ran “The Cradle of Tears,” which described New York’s insti-
tutions for abandoned infants. “It is a place,” Dreiser wrote, “where annu-
ally twelve hundred foundlings are placed, many of them by mothers who
are too helpless or too unfortunately environed to be further able to care
for their children; and the misery which compels it makes of the little open
crib a cradle of tears.” “The Story of a Human Nine-Pin” (April 3), which
would later resurface in Tom Watson’s Magazine (in 1905) and The Color of
a Great City as “The Track Walker,” was about “a peculiar individual” who
constantly risks his life inspecting railroad tracks for a pitiful wage. A week
later the Daily News carried “The Love Aªairs of Little Italy,” an almost far-
cical sketch in which Dreiser compares old world love rivalries in an Italian-
American neighborhood on the East Side above Ninety-Sixth Street to the
violence in Romeo and Juliet or Carmen. “This, truly, in so far as New York
is concerned,” he wrote, “is the region of the love feud and the balcony.”40
Running through all of these pieces is the theme of the exploitation of im-
migrants. With the German-Americans of his generation fast becoming
absorbed into the American middle class, the Sicilian had become the lat-
est “nagur” of American labor.
Completely unemployed by June, Dreiser turned again to the magazines,
but it would be a long summer and well into the fall before he found any-
thing. In the meantime, he read the book version of An Island Cabin and
seethed over Henry’s characterization of him. Henry’s explanation did lit-
tle to ameliorate his sense of wrath and betrayal. The Swanberg biography,
which generally skewed the story of Dreiser’s personal relations, has led
scholars to think he was always the one at fault in the various quarrels and
misunderstandings he had with friends and associates. Henry had been a
true friend, but he then took advantage of Dreiser at one of his lowest points.
He betrayed him as surely as he did his first wife, Maude, and as he would
eventually betray his second wife, Anna. He and Dreiser would never be
the same again, though they would have casual and sometimes professional
connections through the 1920s, when Henry may have attended (with his
daughter, Dottie) one or more of Dreiser’s lavish parties at his Fifty-Seventh
Street residence after the success of An American Tragedy.
By contrast, Richard Duªy remained Dreiser’s friend for the rest of his
life, and it was he who now told Dreiser that Street and Smith, the pub-
lishing house that owned Ainslee’s, was looking for an assistant editor. The
titles in its boys’ libraries included Diamond Dick, Luck and Pluck, Brave
and Bold, and Nick Carter. Dreiser was hired initially at fifteen dollars a
week to edit the boys’ books, but his salary was upped to thirty-five a week
d o w n h i l l a n d u p