impressionistic pen-and-ink sketches illustrated magazines ranging from the
Masses to Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. This fellow native of Indiana was one of the founders of the commercial art movement, and
it had made him a fairly wealthy man. He and Dreiser had been acquain-
tances for the last ten years, since the days when Booth sketched for a New
York newspaper and Dreiser wrote for the magazines. Booth had just pur-
chased a new sixty-horsepower Pathfinder touring car and was about to make
his annual pilgrimage back to Indiana. He asked his host whether he would
like to come along. Dreiser’s only outlay, aside from food and lodging for
himself, would be half the cost of the tires they would inevitably ruin along
2 4 5
America’s hard-packed dirt and macadam roads in those early years of the
automobile. Their journey, which became the subject of A Hoosier Holiday
(1916), would be one of the earliest recorded auto road trips in America.
Dreiser was immediately interested in the venture. The idea of return-
ing to Indiana as he wrote his autobiography was irresistible. The experi-
ence would also give him an excuse to write a book other than the third
volume of his Cowperwood trilogy, which seemed commercially unwise
after the disappointing sales of The Titan; it would also let him oª the
hook for a while with The Bulwark, which he had mentioned to his edi-
tors at John Lane but was far from getting ripe enough for publication.
After telling Booth he would let him know for sure in a few days, he asked
the John Lane Company for an advance of $200, which was granted in
exchange for a signed contract on Plays of the Natural and the Supernat-
ural. He then discussed the idea with Kirah, who was working on a poster
for the upcoming publication of The “Genius.” She had no interest in mak-
ing the two-thousand-mile motor trip in what today would be considered
an open vehicle.2
The Indiana-made Pathfinder crossed on the ferry to New Jersey on Au-
gust 11. Its driver, named only “Speed” in A Hoosier Holiday as well as in
the notes for the travel book, was a “lithe, gangling youth” who reminded
Dreiser of the blond streetcar conductor in Edward Goodman’s Eugenically
Speaking (1914), a one-act comedy recently performed by the Washington
Square Players. Their cross-country route was laid out only as far as north-
eastern Pennsylvania because the Manhattan auto club to which Dreiser
applied for directions had refused him because he was not a member. To
avoid a scene, however, the “smug attendant” had given Dreiser one of the
company maps outlining “The Scenic Route” to Scranton. The trio was
joined for the first day’s journey by Booth’s chief studio model—“one of
those self-conscious, carefully dressed, seemingly prosperous maidens of
some beauty who frequent the stage and the studios.” Booth—as a Chris-
tian Scientist or “dreamy metaphysician” who knew nothing of “so-called
sin”—was perhaps the perfect soul mate and fellow traveler for the man
who was soon to visit the origins of his long-smoldering Catholicism.3
Once into Pennsylvania and approaching Scranton, from which their fe-
male companion returned to New York by train, they learned that the Key-
stone State’s roads were rumored to be not very good. Also, if they chose
the most direct route west, there would be many hills to climb in travers-
ing the state. (Today the route is made easier by a number of tunnels in
the western part of Pennsylvania.) With good roads, Dreiser noted, the au-
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 4 6
tomobile could presumably “roll on forever at top speed” (forty to forty-
five miles per hour), but embark upon poor roads with ruts and their del-
icate machine (which, as Booth predicted, suªered repeated blow-outs and
flats even on good roads) would eventually fall apart. Dreiser doesn’t say
much about the dangers of the highway, which seem alarming almost one
hundred years later, except to note at one point that with a “little mud
and water . . . you are in danger of skidding into kingdom come.” They
were soon persuaded to cut north to Binghamton, New York, before head-
ing west again. On their way out of Pennsylvania, dismissive of its infe-
rior roads, Dreiser and Booth took consolation in the fact that neither could
recall any major contribution to American history made by a native of the
state. William Penn (“a foreigner”) and Benjamin Franklin were briefly
mentioned—“But where are the poets, writers, and painters?” This com-
ment, one of Dreiser’s several undigested or passing criticisms of American
culture in the book, raised the eyebrows of at least one Pennsylvania reader
who was soon to become Dreiser’s editor, and typist, and mistress.4
Dreiser raised even more eyebrows by his barely concealed irritation at
the nation’s growing xenophobia, especially toward citizens with origins
in Germany. With the war in Europe already a year old, Germany was test-
ing the will and patience of the supposedly neutral American people with
its submarine blockade of England and the sinking of the Lusitania on May
7, 1915. As they left Scranton, Dreiser found “no evidence of that transfor-
mation of the American by the foreigner into something diªerent from what
he has ever been—the peril which has been so much discussed by our col-
lege going sociologists.” Rather, if there was change, it was in the way Amer-
ican culture seemed “to be making the foreigner into its own image.”5 Once
back inside the state of New York and hoping to visit Niagara Falls, they
considered taking the Canadian route, which would have brought them
out at Detroit. But according to Dreiser, Canada was no less xenophobic
during the war than the United States. He feared that because of the war
and his German surname, they would have to submit to a rigorous in-
spection of their luggage. “The war! The war!” he wrote in his book. “They
were chasing German-American professors out of Canadian colleges, and
making other demonstrations of hostility towards all others having pro-
German leanings. I, with my German ancestry on one side and my Ger-
man name and my German sympathies—what might they not have done
to me! We didn’t go.” (Dreiser’s impatience with anyone favoring the British
was already showing—as it would show again years later when he made a
fateful trip to Canada during World War II.) When this passage appeared
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 4 7
in the first edition of A Hoosier Holiday, the complaints were so strong that the John Lane Company quickly issued a second with a substitute passage
tipped in.6
Even without Dreiser’s colorful vitriol regarding World War I, A Hoosier
Holiday is a magnificent travel book in which he reinvents or rediscovers
Whitman’s spirit of the “Open Road” as the Pathfinder makes its bumpy
way across Middle America. One night, as the auto party sped out of
Owego, New York, just west of Binghamton, Dreiser waxed poetical, al-
most mystical:
There are certain summer evenings when nature produces a poetic, emo-
tionalizing mood. Life seems to talk to you in soft whispers of wonderful
things it is doing. Marshes and pools, if you encounter any, exhale a mys-
tic breath. . . . Every cottage seems to contain a lamp of wonder and to sing.
Every garden suggests a tryst of lovers. A river, if you follow one, glimmers
and whimpers. The stars glow and sing. They bend down like lambent eyes.
All nature improvises a harmony—a splendid harmony— one of her rarest
symphonies indeed.7
Even for this literary naturalist, nature sometimes worked wonders. Yet
unlike Whitman’s love for his divine average in the occupations he surveys
in Leaves of Grass, Dreiser’s aªection in his catalog of the working class is
bittersweet:
Dear, crude, asinine, illusioned Americans! How I love them! . . . How they
rise, how they hurry, how they run under the sun! Here they are building
a viaduct, there a great road, yonder plowing fields or sowing grain, their
faces lit with eternal, futile hope of happiness. You can see them religiously
tending store, religiously running a small-town country hotel, religiously
mowing the grass, religiously driving shrewd bargains or thinking that much
praying will carry them to heaven . . . and then among them are the bad
men, the loafers, the people who chew tobacco and swear and go to the cities
Saturday nights and ‘cut up’ and don’t save their money!8
Nevertheless, America was his “darling Yankee land—‘my country tis.’”
The Pathfinder made its way across the northern part of Ohio, passing
through Toledo, where Dreiser had first met Arthur Henry, and Grand
Rapids, where he had once considered forming a partnership to run a small-
town newspaper. Then it was across the Indiana border into “Boyland.”