fiction generally—had a long way to go in 1912, in spite of, or perhaps be-
cause of, suªragist rallies held that year in New York City.
Dreiser led the fight for unvarnished detail not only in fiction but, as we
have seen, in his European travel book, to be called A Traveler at Forty. Per
the agreement with Century negotiated through Grant Richards, Dreiser
was to provide Century with three travel articles for its magazine and a full-
length travel book if the editors liked the magazine pieces, which they very
much did. Yet the articles and especially the book had to be cleansed of
“woman stuª.” Earlier, Douglas Z. Doty, one of the senior editors at Cen-
tury, had warned Richards that Dreiser had a reputation for being both
“risky” in his choice of materials and “a di‹cult fellow.” In the end, how-
ever, he and Century president William W. Ellsworth had to caution
Richards about removing too much from the book, details that might em-
barrass Richards and his friends. “Why should you not be embodied, like
a fly in amber, in this classic?” Ellsworth asked him. “You knew what Dreiser
was doing when he started, and that he meant to tell the story of every-
thing that happened to him. Please do be kind.”22
Indeed, Dreiser’s travel book went beyond the author’s own trysts with
prostitutes to suggest in thinly disguised references similar activities by
Richards and his friends. “As I read,” Richards recalled, “I discovered that
l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c
2 2 9
George Moore [the Anglo-Irish novelist who aimed at graphic eªect] at his
frankest was, compared to Dreiser, the essence of discretion.” Doty allowed
Richards to make excessive cuts, but restored some of them.23 Yet the pub-
lished book still represented only half of the original manuscript, described
by Richards as almost a million words in length. Before Richards returned
to England in 1913, Dreiser visited him in his room at the Knickerbocker
Hotel. The Englishman may indeed have had Dreiser’s interests in mind
as much as his own when he tried to acquire more than Traveler for Cen-
tury, but he may also have protested too much as to what Dreiser truly owed
him for the European tour. At the hotel during their final meeting, Richards
first tried to put him oª because of the oªensive chapters, he said, but also
probably because he now fully realized that he would not get Dreiser on an
exclusive contract. He was all the more bitter about it when he reminded
himself that he had not only engineered Dreiser’s trip to Europe, but had
endured his constant fear of running short of money and was rewarded not
only with the author’s insensitive remarks in Traveler about himself and his
friends but an impudent letter in July in which Dreiser rebuked his Euro-
pean host for misleading him about the cost of their trip. “My money was
in your hands,” he reminded Richards. “You told me you would ‘arrange’
it, did you?” An angry Richards shot back in August that he had endured
“a rather bad half hour” after reading the letter, considering that he had
gone to so much trouble for his American guest. His only consolation was
that Dreiser had warned him in the beginning that he was suspicious and
mistrusting by nature.24
Dreiser knew that he had tried Richards’s patience and indicates as much
in A Traveler at Forty. In an interview with the New York Times, he said that
Traveler could not have been written without Richards’s help, and compared
the Englishman’s influence on the book to Arthur Henry’s (without men-
tioning the latter’s name) in Sister Carrie. Otherwise, he was never persuaded
that Richards was anything more than a useful contact to British publish-
ers who might produce the English edition of books first published in Amer-
ica, as Heinemann had done with Sister Carrie. “His chief characteristic,”
Dreiser had thought throughout their relationship, was the publisher’s
“strong sense of individual and racial [i.e., national] superiority”—“not an
uncommon trait in Englishmen.” He nevertheless regretted that their rela-
tionship was ending badly. When he appeared at Richards’s “narrow” ho-
tel room as he was packing for his return to Europe, Richards recalled, “we
each waited, like nervous dogs, for the other to begin, I folding my clothes
and putting them away, he leaning back in his chair, interminably folding
l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c
2 3 0
and unfolding his handkerchief. In eªect, I believe, we neither of us spoke
and, after a space, he departed.”25
–
Remarkably, Dreiser was able to finish A Traveler at Forty by January 1913,
having just completed the 320,000-word first volume of his trilogy and
shortly before that an almost equally long manuscript of The “Genius.”
Within weeks of his farewell meeting with Richards, he traveled to Chicago
to pick up the thread of his research on Yerkes for The Titan. Either im-
mediately before or right after the trip, however, he wrote a short story called
“The Lost Phoebe.” Turning from the concupiscent Cowperwood (who be-
comes even more so in The Titan), he told the tender story of Old Reifs-
neider and his wife, Phoebe, who after a long marriage are—like Dreiser’s
parents—parted by the wife’s death. The picture of Old Reifsneider is also
reminiscent of the doddering Old Gerhardt, based of course on his own
father in his last decade. And Dreiser himself had only recently wandered
about another countryside in search of his father’s homeland in Mayen. In
describing Reifsneider’s illusions, which compel him to roam the country-
side day and night in search of the ghost of his wife, he may have been re-
calling how his father was emotionally at sea after the death of Sarah Dreiser.
Continuing this theme, at this time he also wrote a sketch entitled “The
Father.”26
Dreiser remained in Chicago from early December to the middle of Feb-
ruary of 1913. After many years’ absence, he found the city in the midst of
what is now called “the Chicago Renaissance.” He saw two of its earliest
writers—Hamlin Garland, who had belatedly praised Sister Carrie in 1903,
and Henry Blake Fuller, whose Cliª Dwellers (1893) and With the Proces-
sion (1895) Dreiser counted among his influences as early examples of na-
tive realism. He had first met these two writers almost ten years earlier in
New York as he concluded his days as an “amateur laborer.” He met John
Cowper Powys, who was lecturing in Chicago at the time. The Anglo-Welsh
writer with frizzled hair and a hulking physique was to become Dreiser’s
closest of friends. Powys later recalled that “Dreiser was old when I met
him, forty or fifty, huge, bulbous, with a crooked, flabby face, and one eye
lid that drooped. He was a great, a noble, a gargantuan squire of dames.”
Dreiser also encountered the lawyer-poet Arthur Davison Ficke; Lucian
Cary, a critic for the Chicago Evening Post who had hailed The Financier as
l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c
2 3 1
a great novel; and Margaret Anderson, soon to become the founding edi-
tor of the influential Little Review. And he may at this time have first met
Sherwood Anderson, still reluctantly writing advertising copy and dream-
ing his way toward his magnum opus, Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Anderson
later dedicated Horses and Men (1923) to Dreiser (“in whose presence I have
sometimes had the same refreshed feeling as when in the presence of a thor-
oughbred horse”) and credited his early novels with having “started me on
a new track” with regard to Winesburg. Their relationship can be docu-
mented from 1916, when Anderson asked for Dreiser’s help in finding a
publisher for his first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son, but this request sug-
gests a connection already existed.27
He also met Edgar Lee Masters, the Chicago attorney and former part-
ner of Clarence Darrow. A stubby bear of a man, Masters read law instead
of poetry in order to support his family and remained married to a woman
he no longer loved. A poet without much success for many years, his po-
ems bitterly expressing the disappointment of small-town life, Masters
would soon become an overnight literary entity following the publication
of his Spoon River Anthology (1915). Masters had written Dreiser shortly
before his Chicago visit to praise The Financier as well as Sister Carrie and
Jennie Gerhardt: “I believe no American writer understands the facts of
modern American life as well as you do.” He remembered the day he first
met Dreiser, who had called at his law o‹ce “to get the names of lawyers,
editors and businessmen who knew Yerkes.” Dreiser arrived wearing a heavy
coat with a fur collar, “and looked distinguished. His eyes were full of