• CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION
• JOURNALISTIC CAREER
• NOTES

Born: 27 August 1871, in Terre Haute, Indiana

Died: 28 December 1945, in Hollywood, California

Married: Sara “Sallie” Osborne White, 28 December 1898; Helen Patges Richardson, 13 June 1944

Education: Attended Indiana University

CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION

Although the significant facts of Theodore Dreiser’s childhood can be easily summarized, their impact on his views of human nature and experience—in other words, on the responses to life that are inseparable from the central themes of his fiction—are rich and complex.

Dreiser was born into a large, Catholic, immigrant, and impoverished family. His father, John Paul Dreiser, a weaver and woolen worker, had emigrated from Mayen, Germany, in 1844. Dreiser’s mother, Sarah Schänäb Dreiser, was raised near Dayton, Ohio, in a Protestant Mennonite family of Czech ancestry. Since Sarah’s family strongly opposed her marriage to a Catholic, John and Sarah eloped in 1851. In 1858 the family settled in Terre Haute, Indiana, where John became a supervisor in a woolen mill. But an effort on his part to begin a mill of his own in near by Sullivan, Indiana, ended in disaster in 1869, when the uninsured mill burned downand severely injured John as well.

Theodore Dreiser thus entered the world on 27 August 1871, in Terre Haute, with the Dreiser family in dire straits. His father was broken physically and in will, and there were nine children to feed. (Dreiser’s youngest sibling, Ed, was born two years after he was.) His mother was overtaxed; besides caring for the family, she frequently labored as a laundress and house cleaner to put food on the table. The four oldest children, then in their teens, were beginning to break away from John

Dreiser’s authoritarian rule in disturbing and self-destructive ways. Rome was more interested in girls and drink than in helping to support the family, and Paul was in trouble with the law on several occasions. Mame and Emma centered their lives on their appearance and on their ability to attract men, activities which were to result in disastrous affairs with older men and unwanted pregnancies.

The emotional dynamic of the Dreiser home during Theodore’s formative years comprised an ardent desire by the Dreiser children to remain within the family to profit from the nurturing love of their mother, matched by an equally compelling need to escape the authoritarian and restrictive moralism of their father. As depicted by Dreiser in his revealing autobiography A History of Myself: Dawn (1931), as well as in several of his fictional “mother figures” (Jennie in Jennie Gerhardt, 1911; Benecia in The Bulwark, 1946), Sarah was a warm and generous-hearted woman. She sought to guide her family not by precept or rule but by love and understanding. Indeed, her capacity to ignore conventional moralism and to follow the dictates of her heart were, Dreiser later believed, those of a “pagan” temperament. John Dreiser, however, was informed in all matters by the beliefs and requirements of his church. Later in life, in the portraits of old Gerhardt in Jennie Gerhardt and Solon in The Bulwark, Dreiser was to depict a father’s destructive religiosity with a degree of sympathetic understanding as an inherited fanaticism that disguises and prevents the expression of his love. But in the 1870s and 1880s John Dreiser’s effort to control and direct the lives of his children within the conventions of a strict moralism represented primarily a force to resist. And the Dreiser children—almost to a person—did resist, each in her or his own way, though the principal means of doing so was for the boys to run away and for the girls to find a man.

Dreiser’s earliest years were spent in Terre Haute. He was enrolled at age six in a local Catholic parochial school, which he soon disliked because of its unsmiling nuns and oppressive codes of behavior. The family moved continuously within Terre Haute and then, in 1879, to Sullivan, where Sarah ran a boardinghouse. In 1881, with the boarding–house venture a failure, a small miracle occurred. Paul, who had run away some years earlier, now returned to aid the family. Under the name Paul Dresser he had made a great success as a minstrel-show performer and then as a writer of sentimental songs, and he was now in a position to help the family (Two of his most popular hits were “The Letter That Never Came” and “My Mother Told Me So”.) Sarah and the three Dreiser children still living with her, including Theodore, moved with Paul to the Ohio River town of Evansville, Indiana, where he was living with a

woman named Sallie Walker. In fact, Sallie was the madam of a brothel, and it was her money that helped maintain the Dreisers in Evansville. (Dreiser retold this incident with considerable relish in his tribute,“MyBrother Paul,” published in 1919 in Twelve Men. It also served as the basis for a story idea he later sold to Hollywood that became the movie My Gal Sal, produced in 1942 and starring Victor Mature and Rita Hayworth.)

When Paul broke up with Sallie Walker, Sarah and the children moved briefly to Chicago in the summer of 1884 and then to Warsaw, aquiet, almost bucolic town in central Indiana. There Theodore spent three not idyllic but at least profitable years. For the first time he was placed in a public school. When he entered high school in 1886, he met Mildred Fielding, a teacher who sensed something unusual in the fifteen-year-old and encouraged him to read widely. He also began to develop a responsiveness to natural beauty, a trait that persisted and deepened throughout his life. But there were as well the usual difficulties of the Dreiser family—never enough money, John’s intransigent moralism, and the demands of wayward children returning in need—difficulties all the more painful for the adolescent Theodore.

Dreiser’s principal discovery during these years was of his own sexual nature. Like many adolescents, he awoke seemingly suddenly to the interrelated presence of sexual desire in himself and of the sexual itself in almost every aspect of experience—in nature, in his reading, and most of all, of course, in the women and girls he met in his daily life. His response was an immense preoccupation mixed with a painful anxiety over whether he was attractive enough to girls and whether he could adequately perform the sexual act. He also wondered if there were not an inevitable and terrible stigma attached to the sexual, given his father’s fulminations against his wayward sisters.

Dreiser’s early responses to his own sexuality within the contexts both of his physical ungainliness (as a youth he was tall and lanky, with a cast in one eye) and of the social taint associated with sexuality seem to have played a significant role in one of the most distinctive characteristics of his mature sexual life. From his late teens until his death at seventy-four, Dreiser was what he termed a “varietist.” That is, he pursued women in a basic pattern of initial desire, a brief period of union, and departure to undertake another pursuit. Although he was to defend “varietism” on several different pseudophilosophical grounds in The Cowperwood Trilogy (The Financier, 1912; The Titan, 1914; and The Stoic,1947) and the “Genius” (1915), the underlying emotional state encouraging a sexual career of this kind was probably established in his youth. Dreiser’s belief in his possible sexual inadequacy, accompanied by a sense of guilt attached to sex, bred required a constant stream of new conquests to prowess and the legitimacy of sexual freedom.

Poverty was another condition of Dreiser’s youth that remained imprinted on him for the rest of his life. One effect was to create in him a deeply sympathetic resonance with those characters in his fiction who lack the means to satisfy their desire for things that might seem trivial and even tawdry to others but to them constitute happiness and even beauty. One of Dreiser’s great accomplishments as a novelist was to make his readers understand the nature of unfulfilled desire, as expressed, for example, in Carrie’s wandering through a Chicago department store in Sister Carrie (1900) or Clyde Griffiths’s response to the affluence of a Kansas City hotel in An American Tragedy (1925). To be poor, Dreiser realized, meant not merely an inability to satisfy material needs but also an emotional and spiritual stifling and deprivation. In this sense, desire for what life appears to offer asself-fulfillment—good clothes, a fine apartment, money to spend—becomes the motive force for many of Dreiser’s most notable figures, driving them either to a form of success, as with Carrie and Frank Cowperwood, or to tragedy, as with Clyde.

Dreiser’s youthful poverty also deeply influenced his later personal life in several significant ways. One was to make him cautious and grasping in money matters. In some moods he defined his writing career as a calling to spread the truth through art, but in other moods he saw it principally as a means to make a living. Thus, Dreiser produced a great deal of magazine hackwork throughout his career to keep the pot boiling, and—in one of the least attractive aspects of his character—he distrusted almost everyone in financial dealings and was a great haggler. He brought to the economic aspects of his profession the state of mind of someone born poor whose early condition has encouraged a later, almost paranoiac distrust of others in any monetary exchange.

In the summer of 1887, Dreiser and his family again moved to Chicago. Some of the older children were already in the city, and something of a family center was temporarily reestablished. At the age of almost sixteen Dreiser sought full-time employment; during the next two years he worked in a series of poor-paying and dead-end jobs as a dish-washer, hardware store clerk, boxcar tracer, and stock boy. In the summer of 1889 came rescue in the shape of his former teacher, Mildred Fielding, who offered to pay his expenses at Indiana University.

Dreiser felt desperately out of place in Bloomington during his year at the university. In part, he was intellectually insecure since he had completed only one year of high school. But more troubling was his social insecurity. Although a state university, Indiana at this time was not unlike a private institution in that most of its students were from the upper middle class. Dreiser, with his cheap clothes and suspect background, was uncomfortable with the athletes and fraternity men who were his classmates and even more desperately uncomfortable with the self-assured coeds he met. Something of Dreiser’s pervasive fictional theme (seen especially in An American Tragedy) of the outsider seeking the rich plenty on the other side of a wall or window but uncertain of his ability to grasp it probably derives from his own first encounter with middle-class life at Bloomington.

Back in Chicago, Dreiser spent another two years at a variety of jobs. Since he was somewhat older and experienced, these new jobs—working in a real estate office, driving a laundry truck, and collecting bills—were on a somewhat higher level than his previous ones, but they were equally unsatisfying. In the spring of 1892, however, at the age of almost twenty-one, Dreiser made one of the most important decisions of his life. Without any prior experience, and with little demonstrated talent as a writer, he decided to try to get a job as a newspaperman. After several weeks of fruitless effort he was taken on by one of the weakest of Chicago’s many newspapers, the Globe, because the national convention of the Democratic Party was about to begin and more reporters were temporarily required. And so, on this thin spar, Dreiser’s literary career was launched.

JOURNALISTIC CAREER

Dreiser remained on the Globe for more than six months, learning the rudiments of his trade and scoring a minor success with a series of articles on fraudulent auction houses. In November 1892 he felt sufficiently experienced to apply for a job on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, a widely respected newspaper of the day. He was taken on and soon was engaged in several different kinds of reporting. He interviewed visiting notables (including the boxing champion John L. Sullivan), wrote much of a daily column of short paragraphs on life around town called “Heard in the Corridors,” and did miscellaneous reporting, including covering the police courts. In this last kind of reporting Dreiser, like many other novelists of his generation—Stephen Crane and Frank Norris are notable examples—derived from his firsthand awareness of the often violent and ugly actualities of late-nineteenth-century American urban life both a sense of the underside of experience and a realization of the discrepancy between these actualities and conventional pieties about the nature of life.

Although pleased with his job on the Globe-Democrat, Dreiser was forced to leave the journal in April 1893 under circumstances both humiliating and comic. He had secured the assignment of reviewing the many dramatic touring companies that visited St. Louis and, often finding this task onerous because of the poor quality of their productions, had taken to filing his reviews before the companies’ arrival on the basis of advance material they supplied. One night a torrential rain caused a complete halt in rail service, and none of the touring companies made it to town. Dreiser’s reviews nevertheless appeared the following day, making the Globe-Democrat the laughingstock of the city. Without saying a word to anyone, Dreiser left his position on the paper but quickly found another with a rival St. Louis journal, the Republic.

Perhaps the most significant event of Dreiser’s ten months on the Republic was a reporting trip to Chicago during which he met Sallie White, a young St. Louis schoolteacher. (The Republic had run a contest involving local teachers, in which the winners were rewarded with a visit to the World’s Columbian Exposition, then being held in Chicago. Dreiser accompanied the group and sent back daily reports of the trip.) A handsome young woman about two years older than Dreiser, Sara “Sallie” Osborne White (who often went by her nickname, “Jug”) had been raised in a well-disciplined farm household. The two were drawn to each other almost immediately, though—as portrayed later in Dreiser’s autobiographical Newspaper Days (1931) and the novel The “Genius”— Sallie’s interest was principally in marriage and Dreiser’s in sexual conquest. For the most part, however, in background, interests, and above all degree of commitment to moral and social proprieties, the two were mismatched. Nevertheless, a courtship of more than five years followed, marked by Dreiser’s increasing sexual frustration and Sallie’s increasing anxiety about his intentions, concluded at last by their marriage on 28 December 1898. The marriage was a failure almost from the start, since Dreiser at different times felt himself either sexually depleted within marriage or prevented by marriage from exercising his “varietistic” temperament. Although the marriage ended only with Sallie’s death in 1942, the couple began living apart for increasingly lengthy periods as early as 1901 and separated finally and completely in 1914. There can be little doubt that Dreiser’s jaundiced view of the institution of marriage, which he expressed whenever it was a subject in his writing, derived principally from his response to the conditions of his own marriage. Indeed, The “Genius,” which closely tracks Dreiser’s relationship with Sallie, owes much of its only occasional fictional vitality to those scenes that dramatize the anger, turbulence, and recriminations present in an ill-fated marriage.

Dissatisfied with his job on the Republic, Dreiser moved on in March 1894. He initially landed in Toledo, Ohio, working for a short period on the Toledo Blade, where he struck up an immediate friendship with its editor, Arthur Henry, who was later to play a major role in Dreiser’s early fictional efforts. He was then taken on by the Pittsburgh Dispatch, where he remained until November of that year. Dreiser had discovered in St. Louis that he had an ability to write lightweight columns on topics of the moment, and the Dispatch employed him largely in that capacity. Since he could dash off his daily column quickly, he had a great deal of free time, which he employed for the most part in a self-directed course of reading at the Carnegie Library in Allegheny, across the river from Pittsburgh. Dreiser no doubt read widely and miscellaneously, but, as he later recalled in a much cited passage in Newspaper Days, two specific kinds of books affected him most deeply: the novels of Honorede Balzac and the philosophical works of Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, and others.

What struck Dreiser powerfully in such novels as The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831) and A Great Man of the Provinces in Paris (1837) was Balzac’s sympathetic but unsentimental depiction of the efforts of youthful and ambitious but not always capable nobodies to succeed in the great French metropolis. Some did and many did not, but all were engulfed in a hurly-burly Paris of ruthless sexual and financial intrigue in which connections and power often determined one’s fate. This was life, Dreiser decided, both as he knew it from his own experience and felt it within himself. Though it was to be some five years before he turned to the recasting in Sister Carrie of Balzac’s archetypal moment of the provincial youth’s arrival in the great city, the moment as dramatized by Balzac was no doubt a seminal influence on Dreiser’s notion of the possibilities of fiction. In addition, Dreiser was attracted to Balzac’s method of permitting his narrative voice to comment fully on the larger social, political, moral, and philosophical issues related to the lives of his characters. Dreiser was to make this method, much to the chagrin of his editors, one of the most distinctive characteristics of his own fiction.

Equally significant was Dreiser’s reading in the so-called scientific philosophers of the age, those above all committed, as Charles Darwin himself had not been, to explaining the social and moral implications of the theory of evolution for the conduct of life. Chief among these was the English social philosopher Spencer, who, in a vast multivolume enterprise he designated “The Synthetic Philosophy,” sought to demonstrate that evolutionary laws were the basis for every aspect of human existence, from social organization to art and morals. Dreiser in particular recalled his response to Spencer’s introductory work in the project, First Principles (1862) a book, Dreiser later noted, which blew him “intellectually, to bits”¹—in which Spencer argued that the history and present state of all existence can only be explained by the operation of observable natural law. Any explanation of causation beyond this point falls into the “Unknowable” and therefore cannot serve as a basis for knowledge or action.

Initially, Dreiser derived from First Principles and other works by Spencer not so much a specific body of belief as a convincing intellectual argument confirming his already felt sense that conventional religious systems, including his own Catholicism, were false and therefore harmful instruments of social and political control. In addition, he was drawn to the corollary of Spencer’s idea of the “Unknowable,” that since the riddle of the universe was ultimately insoluble one can never have any insight into first causes or final ends. Although later in his career Dreiser was attracted to several different forms of religious mysticism, he was from this time on both a biting critic of organized religion of any kind and a frequent exponent of the idea that in attempting to explain life as a whole we are limited to understanding processes, that all else is a mystery.

But Dreiser also found in Spencer’s belief a specific idea that he later exploited in several of his own philosophical essays and above all in The Cowperwood Trilogy. All life, Spencer argued, from species to civilizations, progresses under evolutionary law until a point of equilibrium with its environment is reached, after which a disintegration occurs, ending with dissolution. This idea of cosmic balance, which Dreiser called, as in the title of one of his essays, “Equation Inevitable” (1920), informs the central conception of Frank Cowperwood’s career in The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic. Cowperwood’s strength permits him to dominate his social environment until his power breeds a counterpower in that environment greater than his own that defeats him—thus the operation of the “equation inevitable” in both the large-scale phases and the total character of Cowperwood’s career as an American financial magnate.

During the summer of 1894, while still working for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, Dreiser made a trip to New York to visit his brother Paul, who was then at the height of his career as a popularentertainer and songwriter. Paul guided him about the theaters, restaurants, and bustling streets of the vibrant city, all of which impressed Dreiser greatly. In November of that year he gave up his job in Pittsburgh, and despite having no assurance of a position, moved to New York. He was turned away at all the New York papers, and though he finally secured a space-rate job at the New York World (that is, he was paid not a salary but rather on the basis of his reporting that was printed), he did not earn enough to make a living. By spring, discouraged enough to contemplate returning to Pittsburgh, he made a final effort to remain in New York by proposing an idea for a new magazine, with himself as editor, to the small publishing house of Howley, Haviland, the firm that published Paul’s songs. The idea was accepted, and the magazine, Ev’ry Month, began appearing in the fall of that year.

Dreiser was editor and indeed chief writer of Ev’ry Month for two years. The magazine was intended for a popular audience, and each issue featured, in addition to the sheet music of a Howley, Haviland song, photographs of attractive actresses and interviews with theatrical personalities. This still left, however, a good deal of space to be filled, and it was filled almost entirely by Dreiser writing under various pseudonyms, since there was little money for outside contributors. He wrote book and theater reviews, tried his hand at sketches and poetry, and, most important of all, began a monthly column of high-minded commentary on events of the day, philosophical issues, and anything else that struck him as being of interest. Titled “Reflections” and signed “The Prophet,” the column was sometimes three or four pages long. Given the free rein Dreiser had in its conception and expression, it is the earliest expression of what can be called the Dreiserian voice as it appears in both his nonfiction and fiction-that of a figure both willing and anxious to use a specific event or issue as an excusefor a disquisition, often including a distinctive mix of the profound and bathetic, on the nature of man and life. (Dreiser’s contributions to Ev’ry Month have been collected in a modern scholarly edition by Nancy Barrineau, Theodore Dreiser’s Ev’ry Month, published in 1996.)

During his tenure as editor of Ev’ry Month, Dreiser played a role in the creation of one of the more enduring sentimental ballads in American popular music, “On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away.” The song is traditionally ascribed to Paul Dresser, but legend has it that it was composed by Dreiser. There has been considerable controversy over the matter, but it is now generally believed that Dreiser came up with the idea for the song and wrote its first verse and chorus but that Paul composed the music and subsequent verses.

In the 1890s there was a great proliferation of magazines, many of which were designed to meet the demands of a mass audience by cheapness (they were often called the “10 cent magazines”) and by concentrating on lively accounts of current topics and personalities. By late 1897, Dreiser felt confident enough in his ability to function within this market to give up the editorship of Ev’ry Month and turn to freelance work. Over the next two and a half years, even when writing Sister Carrie during the winter of 1899-1900, he contributed more than one hundred articles to such journals as Munsey’s, Ainslee’s, Cosmopolitan, and Metropolitan. The subject matter of his articles included interviews with artists, performers, and writers; essays on recent developments in manufacturing and farming; and visits to picturesque settings. Unlike his Ev’ry Month work, little of Dreiser himself is apparent in these pieces, since the conventions governing this kind of reportage required an emphasis on the subject itself rather than the interests or personality of the writer.

More of Dreiser is present, however, in the large number of articles he contributed during this period to the journal Success. Dreiser’s task in these essays dealing with notable business, political, and artistic figures of the day, almost all of which featured a lengthy interview, was to draw out his subject into an account of how he had achieved prominence. Inevitably, the pattern for gaining success that emerges from the essays takes a shape resembling the late-nineteenth-century social construct known as the Horatio Alger myth. (Alger had written a series of popular novels for boys in which a young man of poor background wins success through a mix of endeavor and good fortune.) Early poverty and an abbreviated education were barriers that could be overcome, Dreiser was assured by the pillars of society he was interviewing, by a sound family background, hard work, and a bit of luck. When Dreiser came to write the story of a tragically ironic reversal of the Alger myth in An American Tragedy, he drew in part on his firsthand encounter with people who embodied the myth in his Success interviews of the late 1890s.

Dreiser himself was also something of a success during this period of his career, and given his improved economic condition he had no further excuse for not marrying Sallie White. Their marriage occurred in December 1898—long after, as Dreiser later recalled, “the first flare of love had thinned down to the pale flame of duty.”² During the summer of 1899 Dreiser accepted an invitation from Arthur Henry that he and Sallie visit Henry and his wife at their summer cottage on the Maumee River in Maumee, Ohio. Henry hoped to establish himself as a writer of fiction, and during the Dreisers’ visit he strongly encouraged Dreiser to try his hand at the form as well. Although Dreiser had written several fictionalized sketches for Ev’ry Month, the four stories he wrote that summer at Maumee were his first concerted attempts at fiction. The four stories constitute a remarkable effort, less so in a formal sense, since they are in places awkwardly constructed and written, than in the maturity of their themes. Indeed, two of them, “Nigger Jeff” and “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers,” feature compressed versions of the same evocative themes—the tragic nature of desire and the centrality of struggle in human affairs—that were to preoccupy Dreiser throughout his career. In short, although Dreiser skipped an apprenticeship in fiction, he nevertheless entered the arena, at the age of thirty, fully armed.

In the fall of 1899, Henry decided to move to New York and devote himself entirely to the writing of fiction. Since he was now attempting a novel, he challenged Dreiser to undertake one as well, and so, in the early fall, Dreiser wrote “Sister Carrie” at the top of a small sheet of paper and began. In later accounts, Dreiser reported that he wrote quickly except for two stoppages—the first because he was stuck at the point of Hurstwood’s theft from his employers, and the second in the spring, when financial need forced him to write some articles. The novel was finished by April of 1900, put in typescript and revised, and then submitted to one of the major publishing firms of the day, Harper’s. Harper’s promptly declined the novel, maintaining that a novel about a young woman who has two illicit relationships, with no harm to her character, and then achieves worldly success, would not appeal to the young women who made up much of the fiction-reading public. Dreiser then offered the book to a new firm, Doubleday, Page, which had just been formed earlier that year. The young novelist Frank Norris, whose naturalistic novel McTeague had been published the previous year, was employed by Doubleday, Page, as a part-time reader. Largely on the strength of Norris’s enthusiastic endorsement, Doubleday, Page accepted Sister Carrie.

There then followed, during the summer and early fall of 1900, one of the most infamous incidents in American literary history, the so-called suppression of Sister Carrie. It is necessary to say “so-called” because although Dreiser frequently cited the incident for the remainder of his career as an instance of the control of American expression by philistines, and indeed it was also frequently cited during the 1910s and 1920s by others calling for artistic freedom in America, the facts of the case are either obscure or offer mixed signals. Frank Doubleday, the senior partner of the firm, was abroad when Sister Carrie was accepted. On his return, he read the novel and came to the same conclusion as Harper’s had, that it would not do well. He and his partner, Walter H. Page, then attempted to persuade Dreiser that he should take the novel elsewhere, but when Dreiser insisted that the firm live up to its oral agreement (no contract had been signed as yet), Doubleday capitulated. In addition, there appears to be no foundation to the story circulated by Dreiser that Doubleday’s wife read the novel in manuscript and insisted that her husband not publish it. The novel was thus published in November 1900, with only minor changes from the version submitted. Though not “suppressed” in the usual sense of the term, Sister Carrie did suffer from Doubleday’s resentment in that the firm did not advertise or in any other way promote the book. (It was, however, relatively widely reviewed, apparently because Norris managed to send out review copies.) Much to Dreiser’s chagrin, therefore, the novel sold poorly.

From the fall of 1900 to the spring of 1903, Dreiser underwent a steady decline in spirits and health, suffering from what was then commonly designated “neurasthenia” and what might today be called a nervous breakdown. Initially he was troubled by the failure of Sister Carrie to achieve popular success and by his marriage, but these concerns soon affected his ability to write, and that incapacity in turn increased the pressure of his other worries. During the summer of 1900, at the height of the self-confidence generated by the acceptance of Sister Carrie by Doubleday, Page, Dreiser had planned another novel. As Sister Carrie had been based on the experiences of his sister Emma, he would now write a novel about the early life of another of his sisters, Mame. He began work on Jennie Gerhardt in January 1901, and though he initially made some progress and though a small publisher had agreed to subsidize its composition, he soon bogged down and had to put it aside. It was expensive to live in New York, and so, sometimes with Sallie but often alone, Dreiser lived in one small Southern town or another during the winter of 1901–1902 and then settled in Philadelphia until February 1903. Down to his last few dollars and utterly wretched in body and mind, he returned to New York and for several months acted out the down-and-out existence that he had depicted in his account of the final phase of Hurstwood’s life in Sister Carrie. Dreiser was rescued, as both he and other members of his family had been earlier, by his brother Paul, who arranged for him to enter a sanatorium in Westchester. Jolted back into life by the rigorous routine of the sanatorium (an experience he later wrote up in his sketch “Culhane, the Solid Man,” in Twelve Men), Dreiser continued his recuperation by a lengthy stretch of labor on the New York Central Railroad, initially as a common workman and then as a clerk. By the close of 1903 he felt himself restored to health and was ready to relaunch his career as a magazine writer and editor.

Dreiser began as an assistant editor of and occasional contributor to the weekly supplement of the New York Daily News. In the fall of 1904 he took a job with Street and Smith, the publisher of popular magazines and of pulp-fiction series, and in early 1905 was named editor of the firm’s new magazine, Smith’s. Dreiser’s experience both as an editor of a popular magazine, Ev’ry Month, and a contributor to mass-circulation journals served him in good stead. Smith’s was soon a success, and he moved in April 1906, at a much higher salary, to the Broadway. In June 1907 Dreiser was offered and accepted the editorship of the Delineator, one of the principal magazines of the period; he held this position for more than three years.

In a sense, Dreiser’s period as editor of the Delineator was one of the least productive phases of his career since he had become a newspaperman in 1892. The position supplied him with a good income but was otherwise sterile. The magazine, which was published by the Butterick Company to popularize its line of patterns for women’s clothes, was devoted principally to the presumed interests of women whose life consisted largely of domestic duties. There was little fiction or any other material of general interest, and a great deal about child care and the like. Whatever imaginative spark had been lit in Dreiser by the writing of Sister Carrie found little tinder in this setting. Nevertheless, he maintained his interest in the world of ideas and creative expression in several ways. In 1907 he was sufficiently well off to purchase the plates of Sister Carrie and have the novel republished. Dreiser was much bolstered by the largely favorable reviews and good sales. In addition, while soliciting some material for the Delineator in 1908, he met the young Baltimore newspaperman and freelance writer H. L. Mencken. He and Mencken found themselves to be of one mind and spirit in their contempt for conventional belief and quickly established both a friendship and a working relationship. For almost twenty years, until the two became estranged in the mid 1920s, Mencken was Dreiser’s principal public defender in his reviews and essays, frequently played an important role in editing Dreiser’s work, and served as a kind of unofficial advisor and press agent. Finally, restless within the restrictions of working for the Delineator, Dreiser, unknown to the Butterick Company, became the proprietor and principal editor of another magazine, the Bohemian, which, as its name implies, had areas of interest quite unlike those of the Delineator.

Dreiser was restless not only within the limitations of the Delineator but also within those of his marriage. During the fall of 1909 he met and quickly became infatuated with Thelma Cudlipp, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a Delineator assistant editor. For a year they met secretly, though innocently, until Mrs. Cudlipp learned of the relationship and demanded that it end. When Dreiser refused, she denounced him to the senior editors of the Butterick publications, and he was fired in September 1910. Although Dreiser persisted in attempting to keep the relationship alive after he was dismissed, in the end Mrs. Cudlipp was successful in keeping him and Thelma apart. Nevertheless, the affair—or, more correctly, the attempted affair—had a major impact on Dreiser’s life and work. It was to serve as the basis for a fictional retelling of the relationship in the second half of The “Genius,” a segment of the novel that has had the distinction of being almost universally condemned. Far more importantly, the affair was to return Dreiser to an effort to make a career out of his own writing, an effort he sustained for the remainder of his life.

IN FULL STRIDE

Dreiser returned to an active career as a writer with a burst of energy that lasted fifteen years. From late 1911 to 1925 he published fourteen books. His work of this period included five long novels, a collection of biographical sketches, two travel books, a collection of one-act plays and (in a separate volume) a full-length play, a collection of short stories and another of his early city sketches, a collection of philosophical essays, and the second volume of his autobiography. (Written as well during this period but not published until later were a second collection of short stories, the first volume of his autobiography, and many poems.) There are several possible explanations for this remarkable prolificness. During the period in which he was doing little creative work, from mid 1901 to late 1910, Dreiser stored away many ideas for later possible literary exploitation. The freedom offered by his break with the Delineator gave him the opportunity to put these ideas to the test. But the principal reason Dreiser wrote so fully and in so many forms was his financial need. He wished to think of himself as a novelist, but his novels, until An American Tragedy, earned much less than what he required to support himself as a writer, even though they were widely and often favorably reviewed. The history of Dreiser’s relationships with his publishers during this phase of his career involved his drawing large advances in order to write a novel. The published novels then earned less or a little more than his advances, leaving Dreiser in an increasingly deep financial hole. Hence his productivity in short forms such as the story, sketch, one-act play, and even poem. Unlike his extremely long novels, Dreiser’s shorter works could be published in magazines, earning an immediate and often a quite large initial fee, and then collected, bringing additional income in the form of royalties.

On leaving the Delineator Dreiser turned initially to the unfinished Jennie Gerhardt and quickly completed it by the close of 1910. The novel was read in manuscript by several friends, who suggested changes for its conclusion that Dreiser adopted. The book was accepted by Harper’s in April 1911 for publication in the fall. (There is a certain irony in Dreiser’s circular relationship with several of his principal publishers. Harper’s, which had turned down Sister Carrie, accepted and published Jennie Gerhardt and The Financier, and then withdrew from the publication of The Titan when the book was already in proof. Doubleday, Page “suppressed” Sister Carrie, but almost half a century later its descendant firm, Doubleday and Company, published Dreiser’s last two novels, The Bulwark and The Stoic.)

After completing Jennie Gerhardt, Dreiser, no doubt driven by a personal imperative, began an autobiographical novel that would dramatize the life of a contemporary artist whose “varietistic” sexual inclinations, as well as his desire to paint the urban actualities of modern life, cause him great anguish and hardship. Writing rapidly, he completed the novel by August. Harper’s, however, strongly encouraged him to put the book temporarily aside (the firm may have been concerned about its frank portrayal of sexual desire) and work instead on his planned fictional interpretation of the life of the financier Charles T. Yerkes, for which Dreiser had already begun collecting material. Yerkes’s career divided neatly into three phases linked to the cities of Philadelphia, Chicago, and London. Considerable research—principally using newspaper and magazine stories on Yerkes’s financial machinations, but also relying on interviews for his personal life—was necessary. Dreiser’s initial plan was to encompass all of Yerkes’s life into one novel to be called The Financier. As he collected material, however, and especially after he began writing, he realized that it would be impossible to meet this goal. The novel thus turned into a trilogy, the first volume still to be titled The Financier but now limited to Yerkes’s activities in Philadelphia. The Titan would be set in Chicago and The Stoic in London.

By the fall of 1911 Dreiser had been writing at great speed for almost a year and felt the need for a break. He wished above all to go to Europe, both to view at first hand the setting of The Stoic and simply to enjoy himself, but there was the question of how to pay for a lengthy journey undertaken at a certain level of style. Enter the debonair English publisher Grant Richards, who was interested in becoming Dreiser’s British publisher. Richards sold the Century Company on the notion of Dreiser’s writing a series of travel sketches for its Century magazine, which were then to be augmented into a book-length autobiographical travel narrative to be published by the firm. Armed with advances from both Century and Harper’s, Dreiser was able to swing the trip, setting out in November 1911. He spent almost five months abroad, making a Dreiserian version of the traditional European grand tour. That is, as he fulfilled the traditional grand-tour itinerary of the cultural centers of England, France, Italy, Germany, and the low countries, he not only visited museums, monuments, palaces, and the like but also developed a great interest in the women of these countries, from prostitutes to ladies of high fashion. After returning to the United States in April 1912, Dreiser completed The Financier in August and turned, in early 1913, to the travel book that he had promised the Century Company, a volume he decided to call A Traveler at Forty since he had turned forty a few months before he undertook the journey. The completed manuscript was unpublishable because of its extraordinary length and the extraordinary openness (for its time) with which Dreiser recounted his amorous adventures. Edited down to almost half its original length by Richards and others, the book was published in November 1913.

The Titan, the second volume of The Cowperwood Trilogy, required research in Chicago, and Dreiser spent several months in the city during the winter of 1912–1913. Chicago was in the midst of an out-burst of modernistic artistic expression. Writers such as Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Floyd Dell were coming to the fore; Poetry magazine had been established; and an avant-garde little theater was flourishing. Dreiser did his research, established a lifelong friendship with Masters, and was much attracted by a young actress, Kirah Markham, who came to New York in late 1913; she and Dreiser were soon living together. (He worked her into The Titan as the actress Stephanie Platow, one of Cowperwood’s Chicago conquests.)

In the years following his departure from the Delineator, Dreiser established in his personal life the pattern he was to follow for the remainder of his life. He would ostensibly be engaged in a settled relationship with a woman—during this period initially his wife, Sallie, and then Kirah, to be followed in 1919, and for the rest of his life, by Helen Richardson. But each such arrangement would soon turn into a base of operations, so to speak, from which Dreiser would pursue other, more short-term relationships. Sallie and Kirah were not able to put up with this state of affairs for long; it was Helen’s distinction that despite many bitter arguments and temporary separations, she was willing and able to do so for more than twenty-five years.

Dreiser completed The Titan in early 1914 for Harper’s, but when the firm had already set the volume in type it suddenly canceled publication and instead relinquished all rights to the book, as well as the plates, to Dreiser. Harper’s failed to provide Dreiser with a clear answer for this action, but he later came to believe the source of the problem was his long account in the novel of Emilie Grigsby, Yerkes’s last mistress, in the guise of the character Berenice Fleming. Harper’s was linked to Grigsby through the company’s principal stockholder, the financier J. P. Morgan, who had known her in London after Yerkes’s death. There was also the possibility of a libel action by Grigsby upon publication of the book in England. Dreiser scrambled for a new publisher, quickly found one in the John Lane Company, and The Titan was published in May 1914.

During the summer of 1914, Dreiser— after almost four years of nomadic existence at various New York addresses—settled down in the Greenwich Village apartment he was to occupy until mid 1919. Though never a major participant in the lively Village scene of the day, he enjoyed the freedom of the neighbor-hood and made many friends. (Many Village women supplied the life stories he later exploited in the semifictional sketches of A Gallery of Women, published in 1929.) Though not the conventional starving artist of Village legend, Dreiser continued during this period to be deeply concerned about his ability to earn a living by means of his writing. Both The Financier and The Titan had sold below expectations, which led Dreiser to a flurry of magazine writing of all kinds. In addition, he perfected at this time his habit of haggling with editors and publishers over royalties and the price of his work, even with editors such as Mencken, to whom he was much indebted; this quality of mind endeared Dreiser to few.

During the summer of 1915 Franklin Booth, an illustrator and old friend who, like Dreiser, had been born and raised in Indiana, suggested that he and Dreiser undertake an extended automobile trip to their home state, during which Dreiser would visit the various towns in which he had lived. In 1915 lengthy car trips were still a rarity. Roads between cities were often unpaved, gas stations were sparse, and cars frequently broke down. But Booth supplied both a large touring automobile and an accompanying chauffeur-mechanic, and in August off they went. Dreiser brought to the journey, and therefore also to his account of it in A Hoosier Holiday, which he completed and published the following year, an ingratiating mix of nostalgic memory, ingenuous delight at the wonders of American culture in its “raw” Midwestern form, and a full receptiveness to life in all its “on the road” variety. For the reader of Dreiser’s far more somber novels, A Hoosier Holiday is a delightful change of pace, revealing a writer capable of amusement as well as shock at the vagaries of experience.

On his return to New York in the late summer of 1915, Dreiser decided to bring out of storage his manuscript of The “Genius,” the auto-biographical novel he had completed in early 1911 and had revised thoroughly during the winter of 1913-1914. As usual with his books, the novel required severe cutting but was nevertheless ready for publication in October. By this point in his career, Dreiser’s work was identified in the minds of conservative literary critics and reviewers—especially those writing for newspapers—with the regrettable tendency in modern literature to overstress the sexual in experience. Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, with their narratives of “pure women” (to use Thomas Hardy’s phrase for his eponymous heroine in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 1891) who engage in illicit sex, had helped to establish this reputation. But it was especially the more recently published initial two volumes in The Cowperwood Trilogy that confirmed this notoriety. Cowperwood moves from woman to woman with no conscience and much success, with the author apparently thoroughly in accord with his protagonist’s amoral sexual career. The “Genius” was apparently the last straw. Upon its publication in 1915 it prompted a host of inflammatory reviews, including one headlined “Mr. Dreiser Chooses a Tom Cat for his Hero,” as well as more thoughtful though still biased accounts of his work, such as Stuart P. Sherman’s essay in The Nation, “The Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser,” which was long to serve as a seminal source for those academic and literary critics seeking a basis for the condemnation of Dreiser’s fiction.

Perhaps this reputation for salaciousness helped The “Genius” sell reasonably well, despite its lugubrious protagonist and the bulk of the novel. In July 1916, however, the infamous New York Society for the Suppression of Vice threatened to take action against Dreiser’s publisher, John Lane, unless the book was withdrawn from sale. (The Society had been founded by the reformer Anthony Comstock and was now led by John Sumner.) The threat had both immediate and far-ranging consequences. Although John Lane quickly caved in and ceased selling The “Genius,” a host of prominent writers, prompted into action by Dreiser and especially by the vigorous efforts of Mencken, took up the cause of artistic freedom raised by the suppression of the novel. Many of these figures, Mencken included, believed that The “Genius” was a tasteless and poorly written work, but they also realized that far more was at stake for freedom of expression in America than the quality of Dreiser’s novel. The efforts of Dreiser’s supporters to thwart the action of the Society failed in court, and The “Genius” was not sold again until 1923. But the right to artistic freedom had been raised as an issue of general public concern for one of the first times in America, setting the stage for a more concerted effort in the following decade to overthrow government-sanctioned control of expression by private prudery. Dreiser himself was now fully identified in the public view not only as a novelist in the forefront of the effort to write openly about the central issues of life but also as one who had spoken out strongly for the right of others to do the same. He was, in brief, a pathfinder clearing the way for others. In spite of the pain engendered by the suppression of both Sister Carrie and The “Genius,” this was a role in which Dreiser took considerable relish. For more than a decade he expressed in essays (especially his “Life, Art and America” of 1917), interviews, and letters his belief that the artist in America was shackled by conventions of propriety that were guaranteed to produce a “safe” but second-rate national literature.

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY AND AFTERWARD

As has often been noted, after the publication of The “Genius” in 1915 Dreiser produced only one major new work of fiction—An American Tragedy in 1925—during a career that was to continue for thirty years. (The posthumously published The Bulwark and The Stoic were both based on novels begun as early as 1914.) One explanation for this turning away from the novel form was his need, at least until the relative financial security that followed the great success of An American Tragedy, to keep the pot boiling with more immediately remunerative shorter work. Another was the major refocusing of his interests, beginning in the early 1920s and increasing steadily after, in the direction of large-scale philosophical and social issues. Indeed, from late 1915 to his death, with the exception of the period from mid 1923 to late 1925 when he was writing An American Tragedy, and the last year and a half of his life, when he was completing The Bulwark and The Stoic, Dreiser was not a novelist. He was not only writing and publishing in almost every other form except the novel but was also devoting a great deal of his mental energy to both abstract philosophical issues and immediate social problems, neither of which lent themselves to fictional representation.

Several of the books published by Dreiser in the interim between The “Genius” and An American Tragedy were collections of shorter items, many written years earlier. Free and Other Stories (1918), which included several of Dreiser’s most frequently anthologized stories, such as “Nigger Jeff,” “The Lost Phoebe,” and “The Second Choice,” also featured work written as early as 1899. Many of the biographical sketches of Twelve Mens were also initially published around the turn of the century, as were the city sketches of The Color of a Great City (1923). Dreiser had begun to write his autobiography, the second volume of which was published in 1922 with the title A Book About Myself, in 1914. Of his many books published in the period between 1915 and 1925, therefore, it is principally his tragic drama, The Hand of the Potter (1919), and his collection of philosophical essays, Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub (1920), that reflect his interests in this phase of his career. In the first Dreiser depicts a pedophile who murders a young girl. This highly inflammatory material of sexual deviancy consciously violates conventional standards of literary decorum of the day and is thus perhaps the most visible evidence of Dreiser’s years in Greenwich Village. But the central theme of the play, that inexplicable forces of nature are responsible for human personality and human actions, reaches out as well to the general philosophical position that Dreiser was seeking to represent in the essays of Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub. Both the title of this work, which is a conventional term for the meaningless, and the subtitle—A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life— are meant to suggest the thrust of the work as a whole: any effort to make sense of life in relation to divine ends or human morality is an act of misdirected human vanity.

But despite its mystery and terror, life can inspire wonder and a sense of beauty, and one’s efforts should be directed toward understanding the basis for all of these qualities in the physical actualities of experience. This imperative to understand material life as an expression of that which can appeal to the human spirit—most of all the capacity of the spirit to sense that complexity, order, and symmetry in physical life constitute both a kind of meaning and beauty—was the motivating force in much of Dreiser’s thinking and writing during the last two decades of his life.

During this period two seemingly disparate events occurred that were to play extremely significant roles in Dreiser’s life. The first was his meeting Horace Liveright in late 1917, the second the beginning of his relationship with Helen Richardson in September 1919. Liveright, a partner in the publishing firm Boni and Liveright, was an energetic representative of a new force in American book and magazine publication, a force committed to the support of fresh and more truthful American literary expression. He offered at last what Dreiser had failed to find in any of his previous publishers: a willingness to take risks and to offer full financial underwriting for projects under way. Until Liveright’s firm failed in the early years of the Depression, he supported the often irritable, overdemanding, recalcitrant, and mistrusting Dreiser far beyond the conventional expectation of a publisher’s responsibility to one of his authors.

When Dreiser met Helen Richardson, who was in fact a distant cousin, she was a divorced young woman of twenty-five (he was then forty-eight) with aspirations for an acting career. They immediately fell in love, and within a month Dreiser gave up his New York apartment and moved with her to Los Angeles in order for her to seek a movie role. They remained in Los Angeles for three years, until their return to New York in late 1922. The couple lived together, with many temporary separations, for the remainder of Dreiser’s life. Theirs was not a comfortable companionship at any stage, however, even following their marriage in 1944. On the one hand, Dreiser continued to pursue other women, sometimes disguising these relationships, often flaunting them. On the other hand, he was intensely jealous of Helen. The result was a series of bitter arguments, breakups, and reconciliations—the pattern repeating itself endlessly. Yet, the tempestuous relationship never collapsed completely, just as Dreiser and Liveright maintained their relationship for almost twenty years despite Dreiser’s frequently impossible behavior toward his publisher. As Helen was to explain in her remarkable memoir, My Life with Dreiser (1951), Dreiser was a complex and difficult man, but his intensity of mind, spirit, and purpose could generate in others a love or loyalty capable of withstanding great pressure.

Dreiser’s ostensible literary task while in Los Angeles with Helen was to complete The Bulwark, the novel of Quaker life that he had begun in 1914 and for which he had recently received an advance from Liveright. He worked on this project for some time but then put it aside for another novel, one that had been on his mind for many years. He had always been fascinated, he later recalled, by a crime that he believed to be distinctive to American life, in which a young man murders a young woman with whom he is having a relationship in order to pursue a more socially and economically advantageous relationship with another woman. Dreiser viewed crimes of this kind as a bitterly ironic inversion of the Horatio Alger success myth, since a young man who commits such a crime fol-lows the Alger formula of using luck and pluck to advance himself but is driven to commit a criminal act while lacking the necessary strength to see the formula to a positive conclusion. He is therefore in effect destroyed by the myth. (Hence Dreiser’s title for the finished work, An American Tragedy.) Dreiser had been intrigued by several such cases, all of which had been reported in full sensational detail in the press, but decided that he would model his new novel on one in particular, the murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in upstate New York in 1906. He began the novel in 1920 with a lengthy account of his protagonist’s boyhood, but he grew dissatisfied with the project and put it aside. The extant version of these twenty chapters suggests that Dreiser perhaps realized that he was relying too literally on his own boyhood experiences; in addition, specific material bearing on the Gillette case itself was unavailable in Los Angeles. In any case, he was not working on the novel when he and Helen returned to New York in late 1922 and did not take it up again until the summer of 1923, when, pressed by Liveright for the delivery of a novel and stimulated by a trip to upstate New York, he began a new version.

Dreiser worked steadily on An American Tragedy for almost two and a half years. The result was a final manuscript of approximately one million words, or the equivalent of six rather long novels. A small army of editorial assistants, however, comprised of personal secretaries and Liveright editors, brought the novel down to a more manageable four hundred thousand words; it was published in two large volumes by Live-right in late 1925. The work, with its rendition of a core tragic condition of American life, its deeply flawed but sympathetic protagonist, and its display of Dreiser’s unique fictional strengths in full flight, was an instant popular and critical success. For the first and only time in his career, the reviews were almost all laudatory and the sales excellent. There was much talk of the Nobel Prize.

An American Tragedy was a financial bonanza and ensured that Dreiser would be comparatively well off for the remainder of his career, even though his economic well-being had little effect on his lifelong habit of worrying over money. The novel earned $50,000 during 1926 and by October of that year was also producing a healthy royalty from a successful theatrical adaptation. In addition, with Liveright’s aid (though Dreiser’s suspicions about the transaction caused a temporary break in their relations) the novel was sold to Paramount for $80,000. (The Paramount movie version of An American Tragedy continued to cause Dreiser trouble in later years. In 1931 he became involved in a ferocious argument with the company about its adaption and later lost a suit he brought against it.) These were large sums indeed for the mid 1920s, and Dreiser was moved to alter dramatically his style of life. He and Helen rented a large duplex apartment on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York, where they did a great deal of entertaining, and Dreiser also purchased an estate at Mount Kisco, north of the city, where they began building a summer home called Iroki, Japanese for “the spirit of beauty.”

Extensive travel on a more lavish scale was now also possible for Dreiser; he and Helen made a four-month trip to Europe in mid 1926. A more significant journey offered itself, however, in late 1927, when Dreiser was invited by the Soviet Union to visit the country in connection with the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Visits to the Soviet Union were almost obligatory for American intellectuals during the pre-Stalin years, given their almost universal discontent with the capitalist system in the United States. Lincoln Steffens had gone and returned with his famous declaration, “I’ve seen the future, and it works,” and Dreiser shared with others a desire to test for themselves Steffens’s faith in this new way of ordering economic and social life. Dreiser’s stay in Russia was relatively brief, less than three months beginning in October 1927, much of which was spent in Moscow before he was permitted to make a tour of the southern portion of the country. Accounts of the visit can be found both in the recently edited Dreiser’s Russian Diary (1996) arid in the memoir by Ruth Kennell, his Russian-speaking American-born guide, Dreiser and the Soviet Union (1969). His general response to what he observed was dismay over the crude conditions of Russian life, irritation with the ever-present Soviet bureaucracy, and a recognition of the heartfelt social idealism of many of the Russians he met. On his return to the United States, Dreiser wrote a series of syndicated newspaper articles on his journey that were slightly revised and republished in October 1928 as Dreiser Looks at Russia. Although the book on the whole endorsed the Russian experiment, Dreiser’s overall response to it—as reflected additionally in essays, interviews, and letters—was more ambivalent, largely dependent on the audience to whom he was addressing his remarks. When commenting on the Soviet system to American leftists, he was apt to compare unfavorably the authoritarianism present in all phases of Soviet life with the relative freedom of America; when seeking to castigate some oppressive characteristic of the American economic system in remarks to the general public, he was apt to compare it unfavorably with the Soviet system. In the great tradition of American travel reportage, Dreiser was in the end perhaps more interested in life abroad for its implications for America than in itself.

During the closing years of the 1920s, much of Dreiser’s book publication, as in the period prior to An American Tragedy, consisted of collections of short, and frequently much earlier, works. Moods: Cadenced and Declaimed, a volume of free-verse poems, appeared in 1926. Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories, Dreiser’s second book of stories, was published in 1927. A Gallery of Women, a collection of semifictional biographical sketches, came out in 1929. Increasingly, Dreiser during these years was exploiting the freedom provided by his improved financial condition to think and write about philosophical and social issues. In June 1928 he visited the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, where he discussed with several scientists his preoccupation with a possible connection between the mechanistic foundation of all living things and some larger meaning to life. During this period Dreiser also found himself, along with almost all other writers of the period, increasingly disturbed and even outraged by the interrelated failures of American society to provide freedom of opportunity in its economic system and freedom of speech in its social and legal system. For many writers—John Dos Passos, for example—the infamous Sacco-Vanzetti case was the defining instance of these failures, stimulating them into full-scale social activism. (Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants convicted in 1921 and executed in 1927 for a double murder. Many felt that they were put on trial as much for their anarchist political beliefs as for their alleged participation in the crime.) There is no evidence of Dreiser’s involvement in this case, but with the stock-market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Depression he found his own defining issues and devoted increasing amounts of time and energy to them. In the early 1930s he took a leading role in the effort to free the imprisoned West Coast labor leader Tom Mooney, followed by similar efforts to come to the aid of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of African Americans accused of a rape in Alabama, and the striking coal miners of Harlan County, Kentucky.

Dreiser’s work on behalf of the Harlan County strikers in September 1931 typifies the depth of his commitment to leftish causes during the early 1930s. The county’s political and legal agencies were controlled by mine owners, and when the already impoverished coal miners went on strike to protest a cut in wages, they were ruthlessly crushed. The Left took up the issue, and a committee of writers and journalists, led by Dreiser, went to Harlan to report to the nation as a whole on the situation. For several days, in a setting of antagonistic and threatening local officials, Dreiser and others questioned miners and visited their towns and homes. The dramatic character of the visit produced heavy newspaper coverage, which was followed up by the swift appearance in early 1932 of Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Ken tucky Coal Fields, for which Dreiser wrote the introduction and served as the interrogator in much of the testimony.

Dreiser’s participation in these and many similar causes during the 1930s raises the issue of the degree to which his thinking and writing during this period were principally expressions of Communist Party policy. On the surface the charge appears to be proven. Many of his activities on behalf of various individuals and groups were also Communist causes; indeed, they were often activities that arose directly out of his vigorous participation in the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, a Communist-controlled organization. On the whole, Dreiser shared the party view, as did many writers of the 1930s, that capitalism was an unjust economic system that required changing in the direction of state control and ownership of the economic system. But he was also vague on details, had grave doubts about the Soviet model of change, and refused to accept the dictates of the party on issues on which he held a contrary opinion. Thus, though the party continually sought to enlist Dreiser in cause after cause, to the point that much of his correspondence and miscellaneous writing of the period was devoted to political and social issues, he often spoke out against party policy in specific matters. His ambivalent role on the left during the 1930s is reflected by his relationship to Earl Browder and William Z. Foster, the two leading figures in the American Communist Party during the decade. Browder, very much the orthodox communist, was wary of him and in 1932 refused Dreiser’s request for membership in the party. Foster, however, valued Dreiser’s support on issues important to the party, despite his occasional “deviationism” (the party term for those not toeing the line), and became a friend.

Given his preoccupation with social matters for much of the 1930s and, from mid decade on, his deepening interest in completing his philosophical work, Dreiser published little of significance during this decade. An exception must be made, however, for the publication in 1931 of Dawn, his vibrant and compelling account of his early life, a work that he had completed in 1916. Much more characteristic of his publications of the decade were the innumerable privately printed

one-page broadsides and somewhat longer leaflets on a wide variety of issues that he mailed widely to everyone he could think of. Dreiser’s two book-length tracts of the period were complete failures. Tragic America (1931), much of which was prepared by assistants, consists of poorly digested “factual” evidence (much of it in error) demonstrating the failure of the American system, accompanied by a’ vehement polemic. America Is Worth Saving (1941), which was largely ghost-written, was a party-line attack on America’s support of Britain in World War II. Within six months of its publication, after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union made England and the Soviet Union allies, both Dreiser and the Communist Party completely reversed their position.

One further distraction during this period arose out of Dreiser’s decision in mid 1932 to participate as an editor in a new magazine, The American Spectator. The journal, which boasted a distinguished group of co-editors, including George Jean Nathan (who had edited the American Mercury with Mencken), Ernest Boyd, and Eugene O’Neill, was intended to raise the level of magazine writing in the country. For more than eigh-teen months Dreiser spent much time soliciting contributions, making editorial suggestions and decisions, and arguing with his co-editors. In the end, the interests and temperaments of the editors failed to mesh, and Dreiser resigned from the magazine’s editorial board in early 1934.

Despite his financial “killing” from An American Tragedy, Dreiser felt himself increasingly pressed economically as the decade advanced. The crash of 1929 and the failure of Liveright’s firm a few years afterward cut deeply into his income, and the Depression had the general effect of providing few profitable outlets for his shorter works. In 1931 Dreiser and Helen gave up their luxurious Fifty-seventh Street apartment and began an existence of hotel living, largely on the Upper West Side. As the decade went on, Dreiser’s new publisher, Simon and Schuster, frequently prompted him to complete The Bulwark as a way of recouping his for-tunes, but he found it almost impossible to work on both this novel and the last volume of The Cowperwood Trilogy, The Stoic, which was also unfinished. Instead, for almost ten years, from the mid 1930s until 1944, Dreiser gave most of his attention to his philosophical study. This was to be an all-inclusive work—perhaps modeled on Herbert Spencer’s vast Synthetic Philosophy project, which had deeply influenced him in his youth—in which Dreiser would bring together large areas of knowledge in order to demonstrate that all life was the expression of a creative force that manifested itself by means of the mechanistic formulas governing every aspect of existence. Titled “The Formula Called Man” in Dreiser’s manuscripts, portions were published posthumously with the title Notes on Life in 1974. The work, because it depended on an understanding of biological research as well as complex philosophical issues, required qualities of mind and endeavor beyond Dreiser’s capabilities, despite his visits to research centers during the decade, his questioning of scientists, and his reading in scientifically oriented philosophy. For the student of Dreiser’s life and fiction, however, the project is of considerable interest.

Its thinking informs the recasting of The Bulwark and of the final portion of The Stoic, which he was to undertake during 1944 and 1945. More broadly, Dreiser’s attempt in the philosophical work to reconcile the rival claims of a scientifically based determinism and a religiously centered mysticism represents his final statement in an effort that dated from the beginning of his career.

In the final years of the 1930s, Dreiser, as was true of many of his fellow writers, became increasingly troubled about the rise to power of fascist governments in Europe. He joined and participated in several international antifascist organizations and, during the summer of 1938, in connection with this concern, journeyed to Paris and then to Spain, which was in the midst of its civil war pitting fascists against the republi-cans of the elected government. Stricken by the conditions in war-torn Spain, Dreiser sought to influence a possible change in the official American policy of neutrality toward the conflict by corresponding and meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

By late 1938 Dreiser was tired of a hotel existence in New York and moved permanently to Los Angeles, where he and Helen lived until his death in December 1945. Money was still in short supply until he received a double windfall from the motion picture industry. In 1940, RKO bought the movie rights to Sister Carrie for $40,000. In 1941, 20th Century-Fox agreed to pay $50,000 for My Gal Sal, a movie adaptation of the early life of Dreiser’s brother Paul. During these years in Los Angeles, Dreiser, as is not uncommon in the declining years of a major writer, felt neglected and out of the mainstream. His intense Anglophobia made his views on international affairs almost extraneous, and few were interested in his philosophical speculations. A large contribution to his self-esteem came, however, in May 1944, when the American Academy of Arts and Letters bestowed on him its Award of Merit, a prize conferred only once every five years, in a widely publicized ceremony in New York. After the publication of An American Tragedy it had been commonly assumed that Dreiser would be the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Instead, Sinclair Lewis achieved that distinction in 1930, after which Dreiser’s political radicalism made him an unlikely choice for the award. In addition, the conservative-minded Pulitzer Prize committee had never seen fit to offer him that prize. So here at last was a major public honor, one, however, with a considerable degree of irony attached, since Dreiser and Mencken had often attacked the Academy during the 1920s as a reactionary bastion of the literary establishment.

It was perhaps the long and tiring journey to New York, as well as Dreiser’s increasingly poor health, that led him in mid 1944 to make several decisions of the “tidying up at the close” variety. One was to marry Helen at last, after twenty-five years of an “irregular” relationship, in June of that year. Another was formally to join the Communist Party in July 1945, as a symbolic endorsement of what he believed was the party’s commitment to worldwide social justice. The last decision was to put aside his philosophical book, on which work had proceeded extremely slowly, and seek to complete The Bulwark and The Stoic. Both of these novels, however, comprised various manuscript versions spread over thirty years, and Dreiser felt the need for a working editorial companion if he were to complete the task. Fortunately, Marguerite Tjader Harris, a writer and magazine editor who admired his work and whom he had come to know in the late 1920s, was available. She joined him in Los Angeles in August 1944, and though the work went slowly, The Bulwark was completed in May 1945.

Although The Bulwark was outlined in 1914 and resembles Dreiser’s fiction of that period in that it is a novel of generational conflict, it also reflects Dreiser’s own later efforts to find some counterbalance to the tragic nature of life by a recognition of the wonder and beauty of the created world. His central figure, the Quaker Solon Barnes, suffers great pain both in his business and personal affairs, but, like Dreiser himself, he comes to a mystical acceptance of the presence of a universal creative force within the intricate mechanisms of life. Indeed, several of the scenes in which Solon confirms this belief derived directly from incidents in Dreiser’s own experience. However, though The Bulwark is clearly Dreiserian in its reflection of themes associated with both his early and late career, the novel does not resemble any other by him in its style. It is relatively short, the narrative has a chronicle-like briskness, and above all the prose style is direct and clear. These effects were achieved by the severe editing the work received from several hands. First, Louise Camp-bell, an old friend who had participated in the editing of several of his previous works, pruned and revised the work extensively. Some of the material cut by Campbell was restored by Donald Elder, Dreiser’s editor at Doubleday but Elder also made additional revisions of his own. When the work that resulted from these revisions reached Dreiser in early 1945, he was both too ill and too preoccupied with the completion of The Stoic to make any objections.

Marguerite Harris returned to the East after aiding Dreiser with The Bulwark, and Helen now served a similar though lesser role in the completion of The Stoic, a task Dreiser began in late spring. Much of the novel, which deals with Cowperwood’s relationship with the ethereal Berenice Fleming and his efforts to finance the London underground system, had already been written; what was still necessary was a revision of the approximately two-thirds of the novel that Dreiser had completed earlier (mostly in the early 1930s) and the completion of the final section, which was to deal with Cowperwood’s death and Berenice’s later life. The book Dreiser and Helen produced in response to this task is as anomalous in its own way as is The Bulwark. The previously written portion of the novel resembles The Financier and The Titan in its alternating attention to Cowperwood’s boardroom and bedroom successes, albeit in rather compressed accounts compared to the earlier novels of the trilogy. But the last section takes the reader on an entirely different tack. In his final years Dreiser had become interested in Hinduism as a mystically based belief similar in nature to his earlier interest in Quakerism, with both religions related to his own recent beliefs. Thus, in the portion of the novel written in late 1945, Cowperwood in his last years uncharacteristically begins to think of himself as a philanthropist, and Berenice, after his death, journeys to India, accepts Hinduism, and returns to America committed to a life of good works based on that faith.

The Stoic was completed in October 1945 and was sent to the novelist James T. Farrell for criticism. Farrell, who was a great admirer of Dreiser’s work, had also offered advice about The Bulwark. He thought the ending of the novel needed revision and made some suggestions that Dreiser thought good. Dreiser outlined to Helen how he wished to revise the conclusion, but before doing any of the actual writing, he died of a heart attack on 28 December 1945.

NOTES

1. Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days (New York: Liveright, 1931), p. 457.

2. Ibid., p. 502.