The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

extremely sensitive and ruminative child whose life was darkened by an in-

tense and almost pathologic desire for aªection which he never received”

from his mother.41 Around the same time, a third daughter, Theresa, broke

up with her lover and arrived in Warsaw in tears. She, at least, had not be-

come pregnant.

When Dreiser was in ninth grade, Sarah moved her enlarged family across

the street to a brick house of fourteen or fifteen rooms known as “Thrall’s

House.” Although it had ample room, it had no indoor plumbing, merely

an outhouse covered over with grapevines. Even though John Paul was work-

ing and contributing what he could aªord, there simply wasn’t enough

money coming in. Having to support unwed daughters, however tem-

porarily, and occasionally having to host the unwelcome Rome, Sarah found

it necessary to find cheaper quarters and more space. Yet the house had a

garden and fruit trees, and young Dreiser, lost in his own adolescent world

of romance and reading, absolutely loved living there. At least he remem-

bered it that way in Dawn.

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At this time Dreiser encountered another teacher who was to stand out

in his memory. Tall, gangling, and with protruding teeth, Mildred Field-

ing had grown up as poor as her student in the mill town of Malden, Mass-

achusetts, but had managed to escape the poverty of her youth and become

a teacher. At thirty-five or so, she was unmarried and considered in those

days “an old maid.” Whereas the already divorced May Calvert may have

been physically, as well as pedagogically, attracted to Dreiser, Mildred Field-

ing was more professional in her attentions and perhaps even more insightful

in detecting her student’s extraordinary talent. Having come from an un-

stable family herself, she could empathize with Dreiser about his embar-

rassment over family scandals. One day, she pulled him aside and told him,

“I can see that you are not like the other boys and girls here. You are diªer-

ent, Theodore. Very sensitive. Your mind is very diªerent.”42 She warned

him not to become distracted by the petty gossip of Warsaw society, which

sometimes targeted Sarah and her family—advice that no doubt contributed

to Dreiser’s later disregard for social standards when it came to his private

life or sexual behavior.

Miss Fielding was not alone in perceiving Dreiser’s diªerence from the

other students. “A small paper I wrote in our literature class—a descrip-

tion of a local scene—brought me direct encomiums,” he remembered. He

was even encouraged by the superintendent of schools in Warsaw, “a lean,

pedagogic, temperamental and enthusiastic man” who advised him to read

Shakespeare. Miss Fielding also encouraged his hunger to learn, which far

surpassed her other students’ willingness to study for the usual social re-

wards. Like most great artists, his genius consisted of being a generalist about

life. “Life,” he said, “did not appeal to me so much on its technical or purely

structural and trade aspects as it did on its general forms and surface ap-

pearances.” He was made, he thought, to be a general, albeit close, observer

of life—“of the form and motion of things, their eªect upon and import

to the individual as well as society at large.”43 Yet it was not until many

years later that he even dreamed of becoming a writer. In the long inter-

lude, he fretted over his lack of a particular skill or talent with which to

support himself.

Despite the fact that Dreiser’s reputation for being somehow gifted now

went beyond the family and was even acknowledged by his peers at school,

he decided to quit and go to work. Without influential family connections

in a small town such as Warsaw, however, his chances for success in any line

of business were sharply limited. Furthermore, his family’s dubious repu-

tation wouldn’t have helped advance him locally. To escape his family’s

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poverty and tarnished name, he felt compelled to strike out on his own.

He was already heated up by the American Dream of success, the reward

for anyone in America willing to work hard and be good. (In fact, he first

hired himself out to a farmer, but the work was too exhausting for some-

one accustomed to heavy reading and only light physical labor.) Some of

his friends were already heading out for new opportunities in Chicago and

elsewhere. Restless and tired of the small-town feel of Warsaw, as he tells

it in Dawn, one day he announced, “Ma, I am going to Chicago.”

Although initially shocked by his plan, his mother had always been tem-

peramentally in favor of change, probably because her life had been so

di‹cult. But when she reassured him that he could always come back, he

responded, without any reason for certainty, that he would never return.

In Sister Carrie, Caroline Meeber at about the same age makes a similar

leap into the abyss as she boards a train from Columbia City, Wisconsin,

bound for Chicago. (Dreiser probably had in mind Columbia City, Indi-

ana, about twenty-five miles southeast of Warsaw.) For his return to

Chicago in 1887, Dreiser boarded the nonfictional train at Warsaw and be-

gan again in the same urban wilderness that greets Carrie.

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t w o

A Very Bard of a City

–

Here was the Negro, the prostitute, the blackleg, the gambler,

the romantic par excellence.

T H E T I TA N

when dreiser returned to chicago in the summer of 1887, he found

a city that stretched north and south for twenty-four miles along Lake

Michigan and westward from the lake over almost ten miles of potential

and half-completed development. Cable cars already served this urban fron-

tier while New York City, its rival, still depended on horse-drawn public

transportation. The cable car system was almost single-handedly the work

of Charles Tyson Yerkes, the “Cable Czar” who became the model for Frank

Algernon Cowperwood in Dreiser’s “Trilogy of Desire”— of which The Fi-

nancier (1912) and The Titan (1914) brought that most appropriate Amer-

ican tradition known as the “business novel” to its apex. Chicago was also

the home of such post–Civil War moguls as George Mortimer Pullman,

Philip Danforth Armour, Gustavus Franklin Swift, Marshall Field, Richard

Warren Sears, and Aaron Montgomery Ward. Their conspicuous success

and social doings, well chronicled in the society pages, hypnotized mid-

western America and helped import the American Dream of success from

the northeast.

“Before I was out of my teens,” Dreiser recalled in a 1929 biographical

sketch, “the entire country suddenly awoke to a consciousness of its vast

resources.” Those waking up to the opportunities of Dreiser’s Midwest were

the sons and daughters of immigrants, fellow first-generation Americans

to whom, he said, “Europe was only an intangible memory referred to by

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their fathers as ‘the old country.’” They found themselves in the grip of “an

almost universal desire for material betterment [that] swept the land, one

of its manifestations being an influx from the country towns and villages

to the cities.”1 And the main city that drew them was Chicago, reborn out

of the ashes of the Great Fire of 1871, the same year Dreiser was born.

Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century was a city of contrasts. This

home to millionaires also housed some of the worst slums in the nation.

Three-fourths of Chicago’s residents were immigrants or children of im-

migrants, most of whom lived in rundown dwellings overcrowded with ex-

tended families. Beautiful parks and wide, tree-lined boulevards may have

graced parts of the city, but many of its commercial and residential streets

were littered with horse manure and, frequently, dead dray animals. Few

streets were paved, and most were edged with boardwalk-like structures that

in places rose to a hazardous curb several feet above the street. Chicago had

a saloon on almost every corner and the second largest distilling industry

in the country, even as it was fast becoming the temperance capital of the

nation. (The lake city was home to both the evangelist Dwight L. Moody

and Women’s Christian Temperance Union president Frances E. Willard.)2

Prostitution thrived throughout the city with the help of a bribed police

force.

As the young Dreiser’s train reached the South Side of the city, “with its

sudden smudge of factory life against the great plains,” his car filled to stand-

ing-room capacity with laborers making their morning migration. The tran-

quillity of his ride from Warsaw, during which he had indulged himself in

visions of success and prosperity, was instantly overtaken by the clatter of

Italians, Germans, Poles, and Czechs speaking their diªerent native tongues

and polluting the air of the car with vile-smelling pipes. He felt suddenly