McKee wanted to clean up its image and broaden its coverage. When Dreiser
applied for the job on April 10, he stressed his experience as a magazine ed-
itor who could produce columns featuring “eminent personalities,” plays
of the month, the arts, “a department of beautiful women,” and such spe-
cial topics as “Are the Dead Alive?” “Are We Tending toward Socialism?”
and “Do American Women Drink Too Much?” He asked for a beginning
salary of forty dollars and fifty after six months if he fulfilled his promise
to raise circulation.48
Even though muckraking was on the rise—Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
was published that year—Dreiser promised in the June issue to rid Broad-
way of “the cheap, the vulgar, and the commonplace policy which once
guided it.” “No one,” wrote the author of that “dirty book” called Sister Car-
rie, “need to work here any longer for anything but that which is sweet and
refreshing, and clean.”49 In an eªort to place success ahead of politics, he
pushed the magazine’s circulation from twelve thousand to almost six fig-
ures. As his salary increased accordingly, he and Jug moved from the Bronx
to Morningside Heights. He was now the editor of a magazine that catered
to the middle-class sensibility. Not only were his contributors on the bland
side, but Dreiser himself seemed to be taking a holiday from his feeling of
injustice in the world, possibly even recycling earlier work. In his first issue,
he published a one-page essay entitled “The Beauty of the Tree,” which sug-
gests artistic if not intellectual atrophy: “How, when we are tired of activ-
ity, the fixed condition of the tree appeals!” In the August issue, he pub-
lished “The Poet’s Creed,” bloated sentiment worthy of Bayard Taylor, an
earlier poetic model:
I would not give the bells that ring
For all the world of bartering;
Nor yet the whisper of the leaves
For all the gold that greed conceives.
To me the grass that grows in spring
Is sweeter than Fame’s oªering;
And, ah! the smile of kindly worth
Than all the wealth of all the earth.
In “Fruitage,” a poem appearing the following February, our good deeds
are “better than roses . . . perfect as the morning dew.” Like Ev’ry Month,
d o w n h i l l a n d u p
1 8 4
the covers of Broadway featured dazzling young women dressed to the hilt
or young men in tuxedoes smoking cigarettes and eyeing beautiful women.50
Dreiser was now, however, able to aªord to purchase the plates of Sister
Carrie from MacLean for $550, the same price MacLean had paid for them,
and the ice that had eªectively suppressed the book appeared to be break-
ing up. Even John Phillips of McClure, Phillips, and Company, who had
been so adamantly against him after its appearance now confided that he
had changed his mind. The book that William Dean Howells made a point
to ignore now seemed eminently republishable.
That eªort was mainly spearheaded by Ethel M. Kelly, an assistant edi-
tor at Broadway, and Flora Mai Holly (Dreiser’s first literary agent). “The
book,” he later told Holly, “was in the doldrums until you came along with
the suggestion that you thought you could market it.” Kelly, an attractive
young woman of “the Wellesley–Mt. Holyoke–Bryn Mawr school of lit-
erary art and criticism,” was most enthusiastic about Sister Carrie and may
have put Dreiser in touch with Holly. The latter placed the novel with the
small new firm of B. W. Dodge Company, named for its owner, Ben Dodge,
a “lovable alcoholic” who had bolted from Dodd, Mead, and Company.
The deal was a complicated scheme in which Dreiser became a stockholder
in his new publisher’s company, with the title of “director.”51 The B. W.
Dodge edition of Sister Carrie was published on March 18, 1907, in an ini-
tial run of approximately three thousand copies, which sold out in ten days.
Evidently, the promotion for the book alluded not only to the Double-
day suppression but vaguely to Mrs. Doubleday’s supposed participation
in it, for several of the reviews in 1907— of which there were many more
American ones than in 1901—alluded to her, not by name but as the pub-
lisher’s wife, “grandmother or maiden aunt or somebody like that.” There
were voiced again cries against the author’s colloquial diction, the narrow-
ness of his title (one reviewer pointing out that “the heroine of the book is
not a nun as her title would seem to indicate”), and the fact that Sister Car-
rie was not a “pretty story.” Yet this time, there was a chorus of support for
Dreiser’s unpretentious realism, his straightforward way of telling a well-
known tale without the slightest trace of sentimentality. The Los Angeles
Times of June 16 pronounced Sister Carrie “somber, powerful, fearlessly and
even fearfully frank, and above all, realistic beyond the usual domain of the
American school of realism.” The New Orleans Picayune of July 1 thought
its realism “deeper” than that of Howells and “more broadly typical of Amer-
ican life” than Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, the story published two
years earlier of a fallen woman who drops from a higher place in society
d o w n h i l l a n d u p
1 8 5
than Carrie. Frederic Taber Cooper, in the Forum of July 1907, thought
that the story of Hurstwood “from the first hour of his meeting with Car-
rie to the final moment when he turns on the flow of gas . . . is fiction of
a grim, compelling force that has the value of many sermons.” It was also
acknowledged that the book had never been given a fair hearing when it
was first published.
One of the most remarkable reviews of the B. W. Dodge edition was writ-
ten by Harris Merton Lyon, a writer of short stories whom Dreiser had re-
cently met as editor of the Broadway and whom he later memorialized as
“De Maupassant, Junior” in Twelve Men. At the time, Lyon, twelve years
younger than Dreiser, was—as Dreiser described him—“in leash to the
French school of which de Maupassant was the outstanding luminary.” In
the sketch, he lamented that his young friend eventually sold out to the
school of popular American literature before dying of Bright’s disease at
age thirty-four in 1916, leaving behind a wife and two children. But in 1907
Lyon was full of enthusiasm for serious literature and made his review a
plea for American realism for which Sister Carrie was at present the only
evidence of “a broader American intellectual freedom.” “No wonder En-
gland, no wonder France, no wonder Germany looks patronizingly down
upon us,” Lyon wrote in the Houston Daily Post of June 9, “a nation of grown
men and women for whom publishers must expurgate books before we are
allowed to read them!” But the time was soon coming, he prophesied, and
he cared not whether it was to be “twenty-five years or within a century—
when the United States will have to ‘stand for’ if it comes to the point of
compulsion—an American Tolstoi, Turgenieª, Flaubert, Balzac, Nietzsche,
Wilde, de Maupassant.”
The review was not altogether favorable, however. Lyon was an impul-
sive, perhaps even angry young man, according to his description in Twelve
Men, so it probably did not surprise Dreiser when his review came with a
few barbs. The main complaint was that Dreiser had not elected to correct
his errors in style and usage. While Sister Carrie was a most remarkable per-
formance for “a man under thirty,” it was “to his lasting discredit that, upon
its present reissue, he lacked the energy, the concentration, the pride of his
work which should have impelled him to use his more mature powers in
correcting his disheveled youthful technique. He should have edited this
new edition of ‘Sister Carrie’ with infinite pains.” Dreiser had, however,
done some minor editing: he altered the passage borrowed from George
Ade and, of course, removed the dedication to Arthur Henry. At least one
other reviewer held that Dreiser should have cleaned up his prose in the
d o w n h i l l a n d u p
1 8 6
second edition, but Lyon took what today might seem an astonishing sug-
gestion (in spite of Dreiser’s sometimes clumsy or tedious phrasing ) even
further and no doubt earned his nickname, which is ultimately ironic, in
Twelve Men. “If he had the craftsmanship of Maupassant,” Lyon proclaimed,
“his ‘Sister Carrie’ would be ten times more powerful.” But no de Mau-
passant stylist could reach as low on the American social ladder as Dreiser,
who by the very insignificant or lower-class nature of his characters was
taking the first truly major step in literary democracy since Whitman and
Twain. To be criticized for splitting infinitives or “using vulgar common-
places here and there, when the tragedy of a man’s life is being displayed,”