imagination required known facts that had been lived through, not sim-
ply acquired through research. In cases where both experience and research
deserted him, he was lost. Rufus’s wife is dying of several ailments, in-
cluding leaky heart valves, for which she is given horse blood because
Dreiser thought that it was thicker. “Who in hell was your medical con-
sultant in ‘Free’?” Mencken asked. “Some 3rd ave. abortionist, I do sus-
pect. Know ye that blood transfusion is not done for leaky heart valves . . .
that horse blood is not thicker than human blood, that horse blood would
poison the patient, etc., etc. Come to the old reliable Dr. Mencken when
you want pathology.”22
–
Boni & Liveright published Free and Other Stories in the summer of 1918.
It contained, along with the marriage stories, those written on the
Maumee, one based on Dreiser’s railroad experience (“The Cruise of the
‘Idlewild’”), and a few more recently penned tales, including one calling
on another episode from the working manuscript of Newspaper Days (“A
Story of Stories”). The collection of eleven short stories (many not so short,
one running to almost eighty pages) sold 2,742 copies during the first four
months, but the critics weren’t so sure this was Dreiser’s strongest genre.
Even the classic “Nigger Jeª ” was dismissed by the New York Sun as sim-
ply “a morbid report of a lynching.”23 Unlike the early pieces, the later
ones strained to tell their tales in the space of a short story. Dreiser him-
self had confessed to an interviewer in 1912 that he probably needed “a
large canvas.” The reviews were mixed. One couldn’t ignore the diversity
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 8 0
of the stories, since they had originated over a time span of twenty years.
The Zolaesque realism was deplored, of course, but several reviewers also
noted a Hollywood quality, or “moving-picture touch,” about the latest
stories such as “Married.” A young Virginia Woolf, with only one novel
to her credit, thought that he “lacked all the necessary qualities for a writer
of short stories.” Yet she had nevertheless enjoyed “the book considerably”
because of the vitality with which the author presented his American char-
acters. Others thought Dreiser was trying too hard to write “popular stuª ”
in the newer stories.24 Actually, he was trying too hard to stay alive as a
writer and so was experimenting with genres other than the novel. The
ongoing trouble over The “Genius” had temporarily stifled his creative in-
stincts. Free itself had been largely a recycling of earlier work, and The
Hand of the Potter had come almost as a dare in response to Sumner’s at-
tack on his novel.
His next book to be published by Boni & Liveright was Twelve Men
(1919), a collection of mainly turn-of-the-century narratives, which is con-
sidered by many as Dreiser’s finest book after Sister Carrie and An Amer-
ican Tragedy. While it was not a bestseller, it sold better than Free and grad-
ually grew in popularity, being reprinted several times over the next decade.
The twelve sketches, including “My Brother Paul,” consisted of character
analyses and autobiography. Mencken came back into the fold one last time
to find the same “high swing” in the book as could be found in Sister Car-
rie and A Hoosier Holiday: “It shows, with a few unimportant breaks, a de-
liberate return to his first manner—the manner of pure representation, of
searching understanding, of unfailing gusto and contagious wonderment.”
Mencken afterward urged Dreiser to write a full-length biography of his
brother Paul, but Dreiser had already put most of the known facts into “My
Brother Paul” as well as the yet-to-be-published Newspaper Days. 25
This homecoming of twelve men who had either influenced Dreiser
significantly or whetted his curiosity ranged from Peter McCord (“Peter”)
to William Louis Sonntag (“W.L.S.”), both graphic artists who had taught
Dreiser about the “color” of the city. Charlie Potter in “A Doer of the Word”
was to Dreiser one of those mystery men, like the Captain in Sister Carrie,
who did not exclusively follow their animal instincts for survival but who
dedicated their eªorts to others. “My Brother Paul,” of course, was the jewel
of the collection. Paul by this time had been reburied in Chicago with his
parents, but his brother still thought of him “as not there or anywhere in
the realm of space, but on Broadway between Twenty-ninth and Forty-sec-
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 8 1
ond Streets. . . . Ah, Broadway! Broadway! And you, my good brother! Here
is the story that you wanted me to write, this little testimony to your mem-
ory, a pale, pale symbol of all I think and feel.” “The Country Doctor” is
a conflation of both his family doctor and Jug’s in Danville, Missouri. “Cul-
hane, The Solid Man” celebrated William Muldoon, the boxing and
wrestling coach who had harassed Dreiser back into good health at his san-
itarium in White Plains, New York, in 1903. “A True Patriarch” was based
on Dreiser’s father-in-law, Archibald White, who like the author was one
of thirteen children. One wonders what White had thought of Dreiser af-
ter he married his daughter ( Jug’s niece was so angry with Dreiser that she
refused to cooperate with the early biographer Robert H. Elias), but Dreiser
remembered his father-in-law as the Whitmanesque democrat who looked
out for “the sick, the poor, the widows, the orphans, the insane, and de-
pendents of all kinds.” As noted earlier, despite his own large family, White
followed to the core the bard’s advice in the 1855 Preface of Leaves of Grass
to love the earth, to “give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stu-
pid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants” and
so make one’s life so that “your very flesh shall be a great poem.”26 The sim-
ilarity with the Good Gray Poet was also physical, for Arch White also pos-
sessed a high forehead and flowing, white hair.
Recently, Dreiser himself had again been compared to Whitman. John
Cowper Powys had seen the similarity in The “Genius,” and now William
Marion Reedy in St. Louis remarked of Free: “I don’t think Walt Whitman
was a whit more American than Theodore Dreiser.” (Reedy said he had
known the poet’s favorite brother, Thomas Jeªerson Whitman, who had
been a water commissioner in St. Louis before his death in 1890.) “Theodore
was a serious boy,” Reedy wrote, “bent on doing something big in letters.
Well, he has done it in his novels. He does it something as Walt did his big
things, by putting everything in.”27
The other sketches in Twelve Men included the remembrance of the late
Harris Merton Lyon (“De Maupassant, Jr.”), whom Dreiser had met in 1906;
a factually toned sketch of Elihu H. Potter (“The Village Feudists”), an ec-
centric Good Samaritan he had interviewed in Noank while staying with
Arthur Henry in his “Island Cabin” oª the coast of Connecticut; the story
of Joseph G. Robin (“‘Vanity, Vanity,’ Saith the Preacher”), a New York
financier Dreiser had met while editing the Delineator, who rose out of
poverty and a murky past; yet another version of his epitaph for Mike Burke
(“The Mighty Rourke”), the New York Central Railroad foreman of the ma-
sonry crew Dreiser worked for in 1903; and a reworking of his earlier piece
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 8 2
on Thomas P. Taylor (“A Mayor and His People”), the quasi-socialist who
had tried unsuccessfully to reform the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut. One
common thread runs through the sketches: these men were dreamers who
woke up to act out their romantic impulses. Though lovable, many are also
self-destructive. The sketch of Joseph G. Robin, for example, may have
influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald in the creation of Jay Gatsby.28
Underscoring the biographies is the implication that each man could not
help becoming what he became. By the time Dreiser prepared Twelve Men
for the press, he was working up many of the essays in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub:
A Book of the Mystery and the Wonder and Terror of Life (1920). Several of
these essays reflect the influence of the behaviorist Jacques Loeb’s The Mech-
anistic Conception of Life (1912), which explained existence or nature as a series
of tropisms, or predetermined and interrelated responses to physical stim-
uli. Earlier naturalists had attributed most activity to the instinct of self-
preservation, but Loeb argued, for example, that the caterpillar does not climb
to the topmost branch, where food is available in the first buds of spring,
with any conscious purpose of feeding itself. Rather, the larva responds to
light—as any plant turns toward the sun in a heliotropism. Man, as Dreiser