criticism will fix public belief, that it is always anxious to believe the worst.”8
A potential Dreiser-Mencken quarrel was a pending disaster for American
literature on the front line of change in this period. Already most old-line
publishers eschewed writers who were making similar kinds of assaults on
American puritanism. It was ultimately left to the upstart Jewish publish-
ers who were then generally discriminated against as editors in the estab-
lished houses to publish some of the greatest writers of the twentieth cen-
tury. A Book of Prefaces was eventually issued by the newly organized house
of Alfred A. Knopf.
One of the earliest Jewish publishers unafraid of promoting new or con-
troversial writers was Ben Huebsch, who had begun in 1902 and who would
shortly publish Winesburg, Ohio. 9 In a letter dated March 6, 1918, he oªered
Dreiser the “fatherly suggestion” that “this life is too short for two such in-
telligent persons as you and Mencken to be at odds with each other.” Dreiser
responded much as he had to the editor at John Lane. He understated the
situation somewhat to say that he and Mencken were “on the best of terms
personally.” They diverged only in Mencken’s opinion of his latest work.
“His profound admiration, apparently, is only for Sister Carrie and Jennie
Gerhardt, works which to me represent really old-line conventional senti-
ment.” Of course, Mencken had also publicly admired The Titan and A
Hoosier Holiday, and had published some of Dreiser’s experimental one-act
plays as well in The Smart Set. Yet the two writers were already politically
divided. And as Dreiser drifted further left, his literary themes began to
reflect a focus more on the social ills of America than simply its oppressive
literary conditions. Still insisting that there was nothing personal in their
literary diªerences, he told Huebsch that he now considered his friend more
as a critic than a comrade. Since Mencken “feels it incumbent upon him
as a critic to place me in a somewhat ridiculous light, I have felt that this
close personal contact might as well be eliminated, for the time being any-
how.” This awkwardness if not ill-feeling was mutual. When Dreiser later
oªered The Smart Set his essay entitled “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” which
sounded a socialist theme, Mencken did not condemn sentiments he
would have otherwise challenged but instead begged oª with the excuse
that it was di‹cult in the America of 1918 to slip in “something not down-
right idiotic.”10
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 7 4
As one dear friend threatened to fall away, however, another one had al-
ready reappeared in his life. “Ever since first seeing your name in print,”
wrote May Calvert Baker from Huntington, Indiana, “I have wondered if
you were ‘my’ Theodore Dreiser.” It was his teacher from Warsaw, the one
only nine years older than himself, whom he had found so attractive and
aªectionate. Now, almost thirty years later, she had read A Hoosier Holiday,
in which she was reported to have died young. “You see I am not dead a
bit but very much alive and still teaching the young to aspire, to strive and
if possible to win.” She was saddened, however, to have to infer from his
book that life had been something of a disappointment to him. She
thanked him for “the beautiful story of your first term in Warsaw. I am glad
I was that teacher,” she told him and urged him to write to “say you are
glad I am not dead.” Dreiser wrote back almost immediately, recalling her
“pink cheeks and warm girlish smile.” “I haven’t been as happy as I should
have been, all things considered perhaps and all due to a bad disposition I
suppose. I am not as happy yet as I might be—who is?”11
Certainly, Dreiser’s “bad disposition” contributed to his unhappiness all
his life. He seems to have been almost genetically contentious, a quality en-
hanced by his having grown up with so many siblings and having had to
fend for himself at an early age. The Sister Carrie debacle had sealed this iras-
cibility in adulthood. But he had other, more practical problems. In the win-
ter and spring of 1917 he wasn’t making enough money from his writings to
do more than survive. In one rather desperate act, not unknown to famous
writers faced with the neglect of the general reader, he sold his books out of
his home. He printed lists of his titles with the statement that “Mr. Dreiser’s
works have been continuously attacked by Puritans solely because America
is not yet used to a vigorous portrayal of itself.” Prospective browsers were
invited to examine his books for themselves and “discover the reason for his
present high position in American letters.”12 If they couldn’t get their book-
seller to order them, they could write direct to 165 West Tenth Street for copies.
It was signed with the pseudonym of “George C. Baker,” perhaps the re-
sourceful Estelle’s concoction as she typed up the advertisement.
–
Shortly before the fall publication of A Book of Prefaces, Dreiser informed
Mencken that he had been visited at his Greenwich Village flat by “Messrs
Boni & Liveright Inc. who suggest they take over all my works.” Dreiser
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 7 5
was characteristically suspicious, but after a snafu in which Frank Shay, a
bookseller and publisher in the Village, failed to publish a small edition of
Sister Carrie, he allowed the firm to become the sixth publisher of his first
novel.13 Charles Boni and his brother had operated the Washington Square
Book Shop on MacDougal Street and ran a specialty publishing business
before joining up with Horace Liveright, who would eventually become
an important name not just in the life of Theodore Dreiser but in the an-
nals of American literature—publisher not only of An American Tragedy
but other such classics as e. e. cummings’s The Enormous Room, T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land, and Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (all of which ap-
peared in the same year, 1922) as well as Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time
(1925). Like Dreiser’s fictional Frank Cowperwood, Liveright grew up in
Philadelphia and dabbled in the stock market, but, in a parallel with Dreiser
himself, his first love was the theater. While still in his teens, he wrote a
comic opera that got as far as the rehearsal stage on Broadway before the
production ran short of funds. He settled into the securities and bond busi-
ness in New York and married into money in 1911. With his father-in-law’s
backing, he launched a company for the manufacture of toilet paper. But
he was a gambler in a number of ways. The handsome, high-living entre-
preneur, who also backed several Broadway plays (all of which failed), soon
entered the book business and bet on many writers whose financial return
was nowhere in sight but who in many cases proved Liveright correct in
his literary assessment. These included not only Dreiser but Ezra Pound,
whose books never made Liveright a dime but whose European contacts
introduced him to many American writers estranged from postwar Amer-
ica and living in Paris. Through the pioneering public relations eªorts of
Edward Bernays, the brother-in-law of one of Boni & Liveright’s vice pres-
idents, he sold enough books to carry the best writers until they became
famous.14
Liveright—more than Boni, who personally disliked Dreiser—was ready
to gamble on the author of Sister Carrie. He was also willing to publish
younger writers as well as radicals such as Dreiser. His first runaway suc-
cess was right around the corner, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World
(1918), an example of the risks he was willing to take as a new publisher. In
1918 The Masses went the way of Seven Arts, and its editors—Reed, Max
Eastman, Floyd Dell, and Art Young—stood trial for violation of the Sedi-
tion Act. Dreiser himself was full of the same kind of “dangerous” ideas,
but Liveright felt that his next novel, really the first one he would have writ-
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 7 6
ten in more than five years, would be a major literary event. He promised
Dreiser that they would ultimately publish all his books in a uniform edi-
tion. “We are very eager to secure you and your books,” Boni & Liveright
told him, “not only because of the commercial possibilities we recognize in
them, but also because we are all admirers of your work. We feel convinced
that once we have your name on our list, we have gotten America’s great-
est novelist.”15
These were more words of faith than fact in 1917. What they got first
was a short story writer and a playwright with the publication in 1918 of