[In the following excerpt, Voss surveys several of Dreiser's short stories, and maintains that while the short story form did not lend itself to Dreiser's particular writing style, "few other short-story writers have written more powerfully and movingly on the theme of entrapment."]

Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, of German stock, Theodore Dreiser (1871-1946) was a journalist in his late twenties, who had worked in St. Louis, Chicago, and Pittsburgh when he began to write fiction. He was unfavorably regarded for a number of years by many readers and critics because of the uncompromising naturalism and alleged immorality of Sister Carrie (1900), suppressed after publication by the publisher and not reissued until 1907, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), and later novels. It was not until the 1920's, by which time he had published his best-known novel, An American Tragedy (1925), that he attained a substantial measure or popularity and prominence.

Dreiser's earliest short stories, written at about the same time as Sister Carrie, are notable for their variety but are a good deal less impressive than that novel. "When the Old Century Was New" is a somewhat stilted historical narrative laid in New York City at the beginning of the nineteenth century. "McEwen of Shining Slave Makers" is an allegory with a deterministic theme, in which a man falls asleep on a park bench and dreams he is an ant fighting with his tribe against another tribe of ants. The conflict, characterization, and setting of the much more realistic "Old Rogaum and His Theresa" are handled convincingly, although Dreiser perhaps overemphasizes his point that if the strict old German father had not relented after locking his rebellious teen-age daughter out of the house one evening when she does not come in as soon as he calls, she would have been compromised by the young tough she has been meeting on the street and would have suffered the fate of other young girls for whom such a situation had been the first step in becoming a prostitute. "Nigger Jeff," based on a lynching which occurred during Dreiser's early newspaper days in St. Louis, has less impact than later lynching stories by Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner but achieves considerable force by focusing on the reactions of a somewhat naïve young reporter whose belief that justice prevails is destroyed by the event.

Free and Other Stories (1918) contains these early stories and seven others. Two or three of the latter are little more than journalistic pieces. Dreiser employed the manner of O. Henry in "A Story of Stories," an entertaining account of the rivalry between two newspaper reporters. Very different is the poetic tone and poignant situation of "The Lost Phoebe," in which an old man suffers from a hallucination that his dead wife is still alive. Also moving without being sentimentalized is the plight, in "The Second Choice," of the working girl who is thrown over by the man she loves. There is likewise little hope for happiness for the young husband in "Married," a story which appears to reflect Dreiser's own unhappy first marriage. A musician married to a farm girl, whose background prevents her from sharing his aesthetic interests, the husband increasingly feels their incompatibility, but because of her devotion and her obvious fear that she will lose his love, he cannot bring himself to leave her. In "Free," also, a sense of duty has long tied a much older man to a woman whose attitudes and values he could never agree with, even though he deferred to them. Should he not, he reflects, have ignored convention and left her? Yet his wife had tried to do her best according to her lights, and he reproaches himself for hoping that she will die now that she is seriously ill. She does die, and he is free, but, ironically, free only to die also. "Now the innate cruelty of life, its blazing ironic indifference to him and so many grew rapidly upon him."

The retrospective method of narration in "Free" has certain drawbacks. When a character is made to review past actions in his mind, the story is likely to seem tedious and lacking in dramatic quality, and if the actions are a cause for regret there is a danger that the character will be made to seem too sorry for himself. Yet Dreiser manages to a considerable extent to make a virtue of the method. The very weight of the slow-paced, sometimes repetitious, relentless accumulation of details bearing on the situation of Rufus Haymaker gives power to his story.

Dreiser was so preoccupied with the theme of unhappiness in marriage that he also treated it in seven of the fifteen stories collected in Chains, Lesser Novels and Stones (1927). Like "Free," three of them—"Chains," "The Old Neighborhood," and "Fulfilment"—are retrospective in their telling, repeat its tone of irony and futility, and emphasize that life traps and deludes us. More like some of Sherwood Anderson's stories are "Convention" and "Marriage—For One." In the first story, of which Dreiser said, "I set it down as something in the nature of an American social document," a man is unfaithful to his dull, drab wife. When the wife sends herself a box of poisoned candy, attempting to make it appear that it came from the other woman, the affair is exposed and brought out in the newspapers. What concerns the narrator is the effect this incident has on the husband, who is so bound by convention that he can easily abandon the mistress whom he had loved to go back to his wife. He is a psychological mystery to the narrator, who is left feeling "cold and sad." In the second story the narrator is profoundly moved by "the despair, the passion, the rage, the hopelessness, the love," of a man whose wife has left him. The other stories in Chains either are journalistic pieces written to entertain or treat themes which Dreiser had developed to better advantage in his novels. "The Victor" is a miniature companion piece to The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), Dreiser's two lengthy novels of unscrupulous financial dealings, being the history of a shrewd and ruthless financier who becomes a multimillionaire oil king. "Typhoon" and "Sanctuary," stories of girls betrayed by faithless lovers, are reminiscent in some respects of Jennie Gerhardt and An American Tragedy.

Twelve Men (1919) and A Gallery of Women (1929) are other collections of Dreiser's shorter pieces, but they are not properly short stories. The former is made up of sketches of actual persons who were Dreiser's friends and acquaintances, while the latter contains descriptive portraits—partly factual, partly fictional—of the personalities of various kinds of women. Dreiser once said, in explaining why he did not write more short stories, "I need a large canvas." His novels and stories seem to confirm that this statement was usually true, though certainly not in every instance. The comment of one critic that Dreiser was never at home in the short story does not give us a fair picture of his shorter work. It has obvious limitations—an almost relentless and sometimes tiresome imposing of his deterministic philosophy on the reader, a lack of psychological penetration into his characters, and stylistic lapses—yet Dreiser succeeds nevertheless in leaving an impression on us, and few other short-story writers have written more powerfully and movingly on the theme of entrapment.