Here is how Dreiser described the scene in his novel:
But what created far more excitement after a very little time was the fact
that at high noon one of the men who trolled—John Pole—a woodsman,
was at last successful in bringing to the surface Roberta herself, drawn up-
ward by the skirt of her dress, obviously bruised about the face—the lips
and nose and above and below the right eye. . . . John Pole, who with Joe
Rainer at the oars was the one who had succeeded in bringing her to the
surface, had exclaimed at once on seeing her: ‘Why, the pore little thing!
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
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She don’t seem to weigh more’n nothin’ at all. It’s a wonder tuh me she coulda
sunk.’ [Grace Brown stood 5’ 2” and weighed 100 pounds.] And then reach-
ing over and gathering her in his strong arms, he drew her in, dripping and
lifeless, while his companions signaled to the other searchers, who came
swiftly. And putting back from her face the long, brown, thick hair which
the action of the water had swirled concealingly across it, he had added: ‘I
do declare, Joe! Looka here. It does look like the child mighta been hit by
somethin! Looka here, Joe!’ And soon the group of woodsmen and inn guests
in their boats were looking at the brownish-blue marks on Roberta’s face.
Dreiser not only deepens the drama of the discovery of the dead girl’s body,
but reflects the emotion of the woodsmen, who in actuality planned to lynch
Gillette, had they found him before the police.15
Dreiser’s last stop before returning to New York was Herkimer, the county
seat where Chester had been tried for murder, the Bridgeburg of An Amer-
ican Tragedy. He visited both the courthouse and the county jail in which
Chester had been incarcerated until his trial began. Here Dreiser may have
hoped to examine the court record, but by this time, so many years after
the 1906 trial, its 2,129-page “abstract” was obtainable only in large New
York State law libraries. As a result, his major sources were the newspaper
accounts, especially those in the World and the New York Sun, and a 1906
pamphlet entitled Grace Brown’s Love Letters, which Dreiser may have picked
up in Herkimer.16 His biggest source was his imagination, which had been
recently tested in the writing of Newspaper Days. Some reviewers complained
that the autobiographical volume was too long at more than five hundred
pages, but what impresses the reader today is Dreiser’s imaginative reading
of his past, for he surely could not have remembered all the conversations
and extended minutiae that buttress the narrative. It was this same big sil-
ver screen that would fictionalize the biography of Chester Gillette.
–
Upon his return from California in the fall of 1922, Dreiser had established
his New York residence at 16 St. Luke’s Place in the Village, where one of
his neighbors was Sherwood Anderson, and another was A. A. Brill, the
Freud translator and psychiatrist, whom Dreiser had known since 1917. In
1923 Boni & Liveright issued The Color of a Great City, a collection of
sketches and stories about New York, mostly old, some done around the
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 0 6
turn of the century. The firm also finally reissued The “Genius” —in its original and completely uncut form, in spite of the complaints by Sherman and
others and the censoring eªorts of Mencken made in hopes of salvaging
the book. It brought Dreiser the highest royalties of any book to date, in-
deed significantly more than he had earned from a number of the earlier
ones. When The “Genius” was first issued by John Lane, it had sold 7,982
copies and earned Dreiser royalties in the amount of $2,394.60 before it
was withdrawn the next year in the face of Sherman’s threats of prosecu-
tion. When Liveright reissued it, it sold over 48,000 copies between 1923
and 1933 and earned Dreiser more than $25,000. He also continued to re-
ceive $4,000 a year from Boni & Liveright in the form of advances while
he worked on An American Tragedy. By that fall, he told several corre-
spondents that the new novel was “1/2 done” and that he expected to com-
plete it by the following August.17
By this time Dreiser and Helen were quarreling frequently. It is not
altogether clear whether Helen ever made St. Luke’s Place her primary ad-
dress, but she had taken her own apartment at 35 West 50th Street soon
after their return east. Their relationship had suªered somewhat in Cali-
fornia, possibly because of the attention Helen was receiving from randy
producers and directors. There, amid the glamour of fast fortunes and the
possibility of overnight stardom for beautiful young women, Dreiser’s sag-
ging literary fame was no match for the allure of the Hollywood moguls.
Back in New York, he started seeing other women—those with whom he
had already trysted, Louise Campbell and the others, but also a new one,
named Sallie Kussell, an aspiring if neurotic writer from Chicago who would
become one of the typists and editorial advisors of An American Tragedy.
“The trouble with you,” Dreiser told her at the height of their attraction
to each other in the summer of 1923, “is that you have a gripping sex ap-
peal for me.” With this rivalry, Helen’s relations with Dreiser had reached
the same level of frustration over his philandering as Estelle had felt shortly
before he met Helen in 1919. Both women complained bitterly at their
neglect, and Estelle often whined, which, given her nickname of “Bert,”
may have suggested the character of the distressed Roberta Alden once she
finds herself pregnant and unloved by Clyde. (Another model, of course,
was Jug, whose seniority to Dreiser may have prompted the idea of mak-
ing Roberta two years older than Clyde. The only legitimate Mrs. Dreiser
had, of course, already served as the basis for Angela in The “Genius” and
inspired the marriage stories in Free. ) In March of 1924 Helen left New York
for Portland to visit her mother and sister, with the intention of eventually
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making her way back to Hollywood to revive her career, this time as a singer.
Dreiser, while persisting in his “varietism,” missed her dearly. And it is be-
cause of their separation that we have an epistolary record of his emotional
ups and downs as he struggled to complete An American Tragedy, “harder,”
as he told Helen on March 30, “than any I ever wrote.” Later in 1924, Louise
Campbell returned from a year in Europe, and started typing and editing
the manuscript. The transcript in turn was being sent in sections to his pub-
lisher, who immediately set it up in type in the hope of getting a running
start on its eventual publication.18
Dreiser did little else but work on the book, but by June he had only
reached the point “where the factory girl & the rich girl in Clyde’s life are
enlarging & by degrees destroying him.” He found himself in a similar
quandary, because he had set himself between Helen and other women.
Fearing that she was possibly seeing someone else, he told her on one day
that he wasn’t “sleeping with anyone.” On the very next he recorded in his
diary a sexual encounter on the beach with one Magdalene Davis, an ac-
tress by night and secretary by day who came from the grimy coal town of
Ebensburg, Pennsylvania. He was now drinking bathtub gin and occa-
sionally even smoking cigarettes, something very unusual for Dreiser be-
cause of his bronchial history. One night he stumbled into Mame’s apart-
ment and sobbed bitterly that he couldn’t finish his novel. It was around
this time that Esther McCoy entered his life, after writing him the usual
fan letter. She was then an undergraduate at the University of Michigan,
and her leftist political leanings would encourage Dreiser’s commitment to
communism in the 1930s. One night in May, perhaps in search of further
romance, he attended a party at the Long Island Sound mansion of W. C.
Fields. He was running himself down and even thought “of going to the
country for a few days—to a work-farm like Muldoon’s used to be to see
if I can be pulled into shape.”19
By the fall of 1924 Dreiser had moved to a street-level flat at 118 West
11th Street near Washington Square, one of the Rhinelander apartments,
where Mame and Austin also lived as managers. He worked every day on
the novel, even Sundays, sometimes from eleven in the morning until ten
at night. By the end of the year he had Books I and II written, typed, and