The Last Titan A Life of Theodore Dreiser
Contents: preface
acknowledgments
1. Hoosier Hard Times
2. A Very Bard of a City
3. This Matter of Reporting
4. Survival of the Fittest
5. Editorial Days
6. The Writer
7. Sister Carrie
8. Down Hill and Up
9. Return of the Novelist
10. Life after the Titanic
11. The Genius Himself
12. Back to the Future
13. An American Tragedy
14. Celebrity
15. Tragic America
16. Facing West
selected works of theodore dreiser
abbreviations
notes
index
p r e f a c e
in the winter of 1903, a tall, slightly undernourished man in his early
thirties, whose glasses added to the look of someone unfit for manual la-
bor, approached the car barn of Philadelphia’s streetcar company at Eighth
and Dauphin to apply for a position as a conductor. Finding its o‹ces closed
for the day, he proceeded north to Reading Terminal on Market Street. In
threadbare clothes and down to his last fifty cents, Theodore Dreiser also
possessed two streetcar tickets for travel between downtown and the sub-
urb of Wissahickon, where he lived in a rooming house he could no longer
aªord. Nothing had seemed to go right for him since the commercial fail-
ure of his first novel, Sister Carrie, published a little more than two years
earlier. At that moment his situation resembled that of his most famous
fictional creation, George Hurstwood, who ultimately commits suicide in
a Bowery flophouse. Indeed, although Dreiser at last received payment for
some magazine articles he had written and was able to return to New York
the next month, he almost followed Hurstwood to an early grave. Instead,
at the brink of despair, chance encounters with his brother and a canal boat-
man pushed him onto the path of mental and physical recovery. Dreiser
lived to write a second literary masterpiece as well as a body of fiction that
remains securely placed in the American literary canon.
Most celebrated for Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925),
Dreiser was the last big voice to come out of the American nineteenth cen-
x i
tury. He lived his first twenty-nine years in the century—and the shadow—
of Melville and Whitman, and he emerged from that influence as a belated
romantic in the age of realism and naturalism that he himself helped to
define. Most of his novels are set in the nineteenth century; even the ac-
tion of An American Tragedy’s tale of crime and punishment is vaguely
placed between the era of the Robber Barons of the 1880s and the materi-
alism of the 1920s. Like those Robber Barons, most of Dreiser’s literary char-
acters aspire to a life of wealth or at least “conspicuous consumption,” and
some, such as his overreaching Frank Cowperwood of The Financier (1912),
The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947), achieve it. (Conceived as a cautionary
tale during the first decade of the twentieth century as American universi-
ties began to establish schools of business to encourage ethical behavior in
commerce, the trilogy is today equally applicable to our own era of corpo-
rate corruption.)
My working title during the first years of researching and writing this bi-
ography was “Lacking Everything But Genius,” a phrase taken from the
critic Mark Van Doren. It evoked what I initially thought was the essence
of this twelfth-born child of impoverished parents who stumbled into great-
ness in spite of personal and educational impediments. But I came to see
that it actually perpetuated a view of Dreiser I did not accept, that of the
“Indiana peasant,” a caricature first developed by his longtime friend (and
sometime enemy) H. L. Mencken. Although Mencken had begun as an avid
and astute champion of Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), and The Ti-
tan, he became disenchanted with many of Dreiser’s later works. A social
conservative and Depression Republican, he also came to disapprove of
Dreiser’s multiple liaisons with women (even though at one point the two
writers dated and ultimately exploited a pair of sisters) as well as his bo-
hemian associations in Greenwich Village.
Nevertheless, the two men’s friendship endured, and after Dreiser’s death
in 1945, Mencken considered writing a biographical study. Instead, what
might have been Mencken’s life of Dreiser became W. A. Swanberg’s Dreiser,
published in 1965. Dedicated to the memory of Mencken, “who knew
Dreiser at his best and worst, and fought for the best,” it was the most ex-
haustive biography to that date and still stands today as the most influen-
tial account of Dreiser’s life. Yet this “Story of a Tormented Life” (as the
dust jacket boasted) distorted many of the facts of Dreiser’s life, mainly by
presenting the novelist’s character in a skewed context. Swanberg, whose
earlier biographies had not been of artists but of outsize and rogue figures
such as General Sickles, Jim Fisk, and William Randolph Hearst, never
p r e f a c e
x i i
missed an opportunity to characterize his subject as suspicious, supersti-
tious, contentious, lecherous, greedy, and egotistical. Furthermore, Swanberg
was no literary critic and was thus unable to appreciate the reason his sub-
ject deserved a biography in the first place. His treatment of Dreiser’s ma-
jor works consisted mainly of bare outlines and quotes from a few reviews.
As a result, his readers had to wonder how this apparent sociopath could
have written not one but two of the novels ranked among the twentieth
century’s hundred best by a Random House panel of leading American writ-
ers in 1999.
Nonetheless, in undertaking a full-length critical biography of Dreiser,
I owe a debt not only to Swanberg’s research but to that of three other Dreiser
biographies. Dorothy Dudley’s Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of
the Free (1932), though at best an impressionable memoir, was apparently
done with Dreiser’s cooperation and contains material available nowhere
else. Robert H. Elias, who met Dreiser while a graduate student in English
at Columbia University and knew him for eight years, wrote the first crit-
ical biography in 1948; Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature was ground-
breaking in the use of Dreiser’s papers, but its brevity does not allow for
the full story of Dreiser’s life. The most recent life, Richard Lingeman’s two-
volume Theodore Dreiser, published in 1986 and 1990, viewed Dreiser more
as a cultural figure than a literary one, with an emphasis on the social and
political activities that made him a controversial figure in his time.
But even as I drew from each of these earlier biographies, as well as from
the upsurge of criticism on his work since the centennial of his birth in
1971, I came to see that Dreiser, often recognized as the “Father of Amer-
ican Realism” and the first major American writer who was not of British
heritage, needed a new biographical framework. It was time for a biogra-
phy in which this controversial life was put back onto the context of his
great literary achievements. For while he certainly had his personal faults
and stylistic lapses (which critics continue to overemphasize at the expense
of his art), Dreiser as a storyteller possessed the rare gift of genius lacking
nothing.
p r e f a c e
x i i i
a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
first, i would like to acknowledge the help of the late Roger Asselin-
eau of the Sorbonne. A friend for more than a quarter of a century, Roger
was my audience of one as I wrote the first draft of this biography. A biogra-
pher himself and a leading European authority on American literature, he
had a lifelong fondness for Dreiser and his breakthrough realism that opened
the twentieth century in U.S. literature. I am also indebted to Richard
Lehan, Keith Newlin, Jay Parini, and Robert D. Richardson for reading the
final draft of this book. At the outset of this work and indeed throughout
it, two leading Dreiserians, Thomas P. Riggio and James L. W. West III,
generously advised me; they also read all or parts of my work-in-progress.
Two other prominent students of Dreiser and American Realism, Donald
Pizer and Frederic Rusch, kindly allowed me to peruse a draft of their forth-
coming edition of Dreiser’s interviews with the press over his lifetime.
Others who assisted me in one way or another are Harold Aspiz, Renate
von Bardeleben, Susan Belasco, Mack Bradford, Stephen C. Brennan, Ju-
lia Roop Cairns, Dominick F. Callo, William Bedford Clark, James M. Cox,
Carl Dawson, Robert Dowling, Yvette Eastman, Clare Eby, Vincent Fitz-
patrick, Robert H. Elias, Ed Folsom, Tedi Dreiser Godard, Miriam Gogol,
Susan Goodman, the late Norman S. Grabo, Yoshinobu Hakutani, Terence
Hoagwood, Alison Cameron House, Clara Clark Jaeger, Karen Kalinevitch,
Justin Kaplan, Richard Lingeman, David C. Loving, Edward Martin, Jay
x v
Martin, Terence Martin, Dan McCall, John J. McDermott, Philip McFar-
land, J. Lawrence Mitchell, T. D. Nostwich, Thomas Rotell, Victoria Ros-