2. I particularly wish to thank Albert Ashforth for his extensive editing of this essay. I also wish to thank Florian Stuber, Madelyn Larsen, and Leonard Cassuto for their many suggestions.
3. Lionel Trilling’s essay on Dreiser was probably the most damaging article on Dreiser ever written and probably the one most often read. See Lionel Trilling, “Reality in America,” in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking, 1950).
4. See Laura Hapke, Tales of the Working Girl: Wage-Earning Women in American Literature, 1890–1925 (New York: Twayne, 1992), pp. 69–85. She provides a compelling, historically based argument about Dreiser’s ambivalence regarding work and the feminine character.
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Also see Miriam Gogol’s review of her volume, “At Long Last: ‘Tales of the Working Girl,’” Dreiser Studies 23 (Fall 1992): 43.
5. Vera Dreiser, My Uncle Dreiser (New York: Nash, 1976), p. 185. Dreiser’s Diaries are filled with telling statements. In a typical encounter, Dreiser tells one of his lovers, Bert, that “she must accept me as I am. I am to come or go as I choose. I refuse to dine with her or sleep with her every night unless I want to” (November 11, 1917). In another, Dreiser generalizes about his inner state: ‘‘Feel very sad to think affection is always jealous and painful, in myself and everyone” (November 21, 1917). In yet another: “Tired of my various girls and wish I had a new love” (November 2, 1917).
Also, see his entries on February 8, 1916, February 10, 1916, February 11, 1916, and October 17, 1916. Theodore Dreiser: The American Diaries, 1902–1926, ed. Thomas P. Riggio (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
There is ample evidence that many of the women in Dreiser’s life were made extremely unhappy and felt abandoned by him. To cite a few, Anna Tatum took to drink shortly after becoming involved with him. Louise Campbell wanted to marry him but knew that he never would. Kirah Markham, whom some have argued wanted her freedom, said “What’s the good of a freedom I don’t want and can’t use?” Estelle Kubitz’s hysterics at finding traces of other women led her to cry in her sleep. She said she could not live with those unknown rivals whose letters she occasionally discovered and Dreiser could not give them up. But even more than them, she could not compete with the phantom of that “impossible she”: “You want me to compete with a wraith, an illusion. … Well it can’t be done and I don’t propose to try” (quoted in Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, pp. 155, 134).
6. The other early exception who comes to mind is the iconoclastic Anzia Yezierska, that “sweatshop Cinderella,” who created self-transforming heroines in Bread Givers (1925), Children of Loneliness (1923), Hungry Hearts and Other Stories (1920–1927), and so on. For an excellent discussion of her contributions, see Laura Hapke, Tales of the Working Girl: Wage-Earning Women in American Literature, 1890–1925, pp. 111–8.
7. Karen J. Winkler, “Seductions of Biography,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 27 (October 1993): A6.
8. Biographers have always perceived Dreiser’s life as relevant, current, and contemporary with contradictions and conflicts that we can recognize in ourselves. Studies keep appearing about his life and his relationships with people. Note The New York Times Book Review’s cover
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story (March 8, 1992) on Dreiser and H. L. Mencken and numerous other articles, and consider the large number of biographies that have been published to date: Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871–1907 (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1986) and Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908–1945; W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965); Helen Dreiser, My Life with Dreiser (New York: World Publishing, 1951); Dorothy Dudley, Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free (New York: H. Smith and R. Haas, 1932); and H. L. Mencken, “Theodore Dreiser,” in A Book of Prefaces (New York: Knopf, 1920). We also have critical studies that include biography: Lawrence E. Hussman, Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Yoshinobu Hakutani, Young Dreiser: A Critical Study (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980); Donald Pizer, The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976); Robert Penn Warren, Homage to Theodore Dreiser (New York: Random House, 1971); Richard Lehan, Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969); Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers (New York: Viking, 1969); Philip Gerber, Theodore Dreiser Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1992); and F. O. Matthiessen, Theodore Dreiser (New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1951). But, as Donald Pizer indicates, these accounts provide only a fraction of the rich biographical material available, for much of it was written by his contemporaries. See Donald Pizer, Richard W. Dowell, and Frederic E. Rusch, Theodore Dreiser: A Primary Bibliography and Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), p. 94.
9. The last collection of original essays on Dreiser’s canon appeared in 1971 (John Lydenberg, ed., Dreiser: A Collection of Critical Essays [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971]). In 1981, Donald Pizer published Critical Essays on Theodore Dreiser. The purpose of that volume, however, was not to provide new original essays on Dreiser’s canon, but rather to reprint articles of literary or historical significance dating from 1901 (W. M. Reedy) to 1977 (Pizer). See Donald Pizer, ed., Critical Essays on Theodore Dreiser (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). The only recent collection of essays pertains exclusively to one novel, Sister Carrie, and includes such excellent essays as Alan Tractenberg’s “Who Narrates: Dreiser’s Presence in Sister Carrie.” See Donald Pizer, ed. New Essays on SISTER CARRIE (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
10. For some of the important discussions of the significance of the term “naturalism,” see Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1942);
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Lars Ahnebrink, The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction: A Study of the Works of Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris with Special References to Some European Influences, 1891–1903 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); Charles C. Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956); Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking, 1968); Haskell M. Block, Naturalistic Triptych: The Fictive and the Real in Zola, Mann, and Dreiser (New York: Random House, 1969); Richard Lehan, Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels; Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966; rev. ed., 1984). Also see June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985) and Lee Clark Mitchell, Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). See Mitchell, pp. vii–xvii and 131–4 (notes 2, 6, and 7), for a summary of studies that have defined historical influences on American naturalism and for a discussion of scholars’ sometimes contradictory definitions of the movement (from 1942–1987).
11. Donald Pizer, Richard W. Dowell, and Frederic E. Rusch, Theodore Dreiser: A Primary Bibliography and Reference Guide, p. 93.
12. Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. (Quotation, p. 10.)
13. Walcutt, p. 20.
14. Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, pp. 10, 11.
15. See note 10 for titles of some of the works by Walcutt, Lehan, and Pizer. Also see Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers.
16. The well-documented efforts at dismissing Dreiser began in 1915 with Stuart P. Sherman’s famous essay, “The Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser,” which Sherman later retitled, “The Barbaric Naturalism of Theodore Dreiser.’’
17. Throughout his career, Dreiser regarded himself as a realist not a naturalist. See his letters to H. L. Mencken, March 22, 1915, and March 29, 1915. Thomas P. Riggio, ed., Dreiser-Mencken Letters: The Correspondence of Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, 1907–1945.
18. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Eric J. Sundquist, ed., American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 1982.
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19. Walter Benn Michaels. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 26, 27; emphasis added.
20. For example, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1992); Howard Horwitz, By the Laws of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Louis J. Zanine, Mechanism and Mysticism: The Influence of Science on the Thought and Work of Theodore Dreiser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Papers on Language and Literature 27 (Spring 1991); Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
21. Among a few others, see Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism; Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York and London: Methuen, 1985); Susan Wolsterholme, “Brother Theodore, Hell on Women,” in American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Fritz Fleischmann (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982); Mary A. Burgan, “Sister Carrie and the Pathos of Naturalism,” Criticism 15 (Fall 1973): 336–49; Cathy N. Davidson and Arnold E. Davidson. “Carrie’s Sisters: The Popular Stereotypes for Dreiser’s Heroines,” Modern Fiction Studies 23 (Autumn 1977): 395–407; Dorothy Dudley, Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free, 1932; Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers, 1969; Helen Dreiser, My Life with Dreiser, 1951.