into their lives.”34
It was to be the Darwinian and not the Social Darwinian point of view
in literature. Upon his entrance into Chicago, Cowperwood parleys his first
coup in the public utilities field into a near monopoly of the city’s street-
cars, bribing his way through underlings until rival financial titans gang up
to deprive him ultimately of a long-term franchise and thus destroy his trac-
tion empire. The newspapers, as was the case with Yerkes, also turn against
him to the point that the financier abandons Chicago to seek new fortunes
in New York and ultimately London (which became the basis of The Stoic).
As with his experience in Philadelphia, the vehemence of his enemies is en-
hanced by the fact that he seduces the daughter of one of the influential
l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c
2 3 5
entrepreneurs, Hosmer Hand, who joins forces with Timothy Arneel
(Philip Armour), Anson Merrill (Marshall Field), and Norman Schryhart
(Levi Leiter).35 During these adventures in high finance, Aileen—never so-
phisticated enough for Chicago society, which ignores the couple anyway
because of Frank’s Philadelphia history—steadily declines into alcoholism
as Cowperwood ignores her first for a series of other women and then finally
for Berenice Fleming, who is based on Emily (or Emilie, as she came to
spell it) Grigsby. Her story became a part of the public record of Charles
Yerkes at his death. Here Dreiser’s fidelity to fact raised legal concerns that
would soon come back to haunt him.36
By May of 1913 Dreiser had drafted sixty-two chapters of The Titan. Ki-
rah remained in Chicago, sending him erotic letters as he wrote Cowper-
wood’s seduction scenes. As Dreiser put the finishing touches on his por-
trait of his randy financier, Kirah’s letters alluded to the tender lines of love
in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” “Twice today,” she told him four
days before a visit to New York in late May, “have I read the seashore mem-
ories of Walt Whitman’s that I love so, and wept, wept, wept over the beauty
and sorrow of it all.” She had recently attended a Walt Whitman Fellow-
ship meeting in Chicago accompanied by her father and Clarence Darrow.37
With The Titan completed, Harper’s now worried that it would conflict
with A Traveler at Forty, which Century was bringing out at the end of 1913.
Thus, they decided to hold volume two of the Cowperwood chronicle un-
til the winter of 1914.
In the meantime, there was the lingering matter of The “Genius, ” now
being read not only by Dell but others in Chicago, including Lengel. On
March 31, Dell, calling it “a very bad book,” advised against publication.
The same day Lengel, who recognized “the originals of various characters”
based on Thelma Cudlipp, her mother, and others associated with the De-
lineator days, wrote to say that publication of the manuscript would “do
more damage to your career than to help it.”38 Dreiser, of course, had heard
before the advice about a book hurting his career—from Doubleday on Sis-
ter Carrie.
Before he could push forward with The “Genius,” however, he ran into
trouble with The Titan, now in galley sheets. “Harper’s, after printing a first
edition of 10,000 copies . . . , have decided not to publish,” Dreiser told
Mencken from Chicago on March 6, 1914. “Reason—the realism is too hard
and uncompromising and their policy cannot stand it.” “If this were Sister
Carrie,” he calmly added, “I would now be in the same position I was then.”
Doran and Company considered taking over the book, but rejected the idea
l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c
2 3 6
on March 16. He learned from Anna Tatum, who was now acting infor-
mally as his agent, that George H. Doran not only personally disliked him
but thought his presentation of Yerkes in The Financier had been unfair to
the average businessman. In fact, there was another reason that both pub-
lishers were wary of The Titan: as word of Dreiser’s use of her history with
Yerkes as the basis for Berenice Fleming got into the press, Emilie Grigsby
threatened to sue. On March 23, however, Dreiser found through his friend
Lengel a second English publisher with an American o‹ce—John Lane
and Company would publish The Titan almost immediately.39 Once again,
not only with the Century Company’s publication of A Traveler at Forty
in 1913 but with Heinemann’s publication of Sister Carrie in 1901, the British
had come to the rescue.
Notwithstanding, Dreiser’s history with the British, as we shall ultimately
see, was a troubled one. Like Whitman, he rejected their aristocratic airs,
yet the English were the first ones to recognize their geniuses. Certainly John
Lane became Dreiser’s publisher with alacrity, once it was clear that Grigsby
probably would not sue. Meanwhile, even though Harper’s had washed their
hands of The Titan, they still insisted on their claim to The “Genius” —which,
as J. Jeªerson Jones, managing editor at the American o‹ce of John Lane,
told Dreiser that April, “cannot be called a Sunday-school story.” Jones added
“and thank Heaven for it,” but he would later have to eat those words.40
–
While both Dreiser and Jones negotiated with Harper’s over which firm
would publish Dreiser’s future work, the house of John Lane published The
Titan in May 1914. Dreiser received a $1,000 advance and the promise of
royalties of 20 percent. Because of its historical accuracy and candid de-
pictions, Mencken considered it Dreiser’s best book since Jennie, perhaps
his best so far, even though it lacked the emotional appeal of Jennie. De-
spite the fact that it was almost two hundred pages shorter than The Fi-
nancier (Harper’s had urged him to produce a shorter sequel), The Titan
sold far fewer copies than its predecessor. The author was naturally disap-
pointed and may have recalled his promise to Mencken right after leaving
the Delineator to quit “this book game” if he wasn’t “enjoying a good in-
come” from it. Three years and (including A Traveler at Forty) three books
later he had yet to reach “the place where I will make a living wage out of
my books.”41
l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c
2 3 7
He thought of returning to magazine writing, and indeed at this stage
in his career he was hatching ideas almost as fast as a weekly magazinist. By
the summer of 1914 he had already drafted more than half of Dawn, the
first volume of his autobiography. He had written or completed Jennie Ger-
hardt, The Financier, A Traveler at Forty, The Titan, and The “Genius” —all
but one out within the last three years. Right around the corner lay A Hoosier
Holiday (1916), at 513 pages. And somewhere in one of the manuscript boxes
that followed him through life was the unfinished manuscript of An Am-
ateur Laborer as well as the stories and sketches that would eventually be
published in the next decade in Free and Other Stories, Twelve Men, and
The Color of a Great City. “I have many schemes or plans,” he told Mencken
that summer with understatement, “but only one pen hand.”42
Inspired by the experimental drama he had recently seen in Chicago, he
also returned to his early ambition to write plays.43 Beginning in early sum-
mer of 1913 he wrote a number of one-act plays, the first of which was “The
Girl in the Co‹n.” Some of these drew on actual events, others on fantasy,
imagination, and the strains of distant memory recovered in the act of writ-
ing his autobiography. “The Girl in the Co‹n” was based on the strike by
eight hundred employees of the Henry Dougherty Silk Company in Pater-
son, New Jersey, beginning in January 1913, in which the nationally known
labor activist “Big Bill” Haywood played a central part. Actually, Dreiser
probably took up the subject after seeing the socialist John Reed’s dramatic
reenactment of the event, “The Paterson Strike Pageant,” which was per-
formed in front of fifteen thousand people in Madison Square Garden on
June 7. Although his sympathies always went to rank and file workers like
his father and brothers, the play is not primarily political but rather focused
on the human imperfections that corrupt even the best of intentions. Al-
though there is a street band playing the “Marseillaise,” as there was in the
Paterson strike, the focus is on poor Mary Magnet, who, like so many
Dreiser girls both real and fictional, meets up with the wrong fellow and
suªers the consequences.
In “The Girl in the Co‹n,” the seducer turns out to be the nationally
known strike leader John Ferguson, who is to visit the mill town outside
New York City to rally the strikers. Mary lies in the co‹n dead of unstated