• SISTER CARRIE
• JENNIE GERHARDT
• THE COWPERWOOD TRILOGY
• AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
• NOTES

SISTER CARRIE

DREISER’S SISTERS

In the following excerpt from the first volume of his autobiography, A History of Myself: Dawn, Dreiser recounts the amorous adventures of his sisters in Chicago in 1884, when the Dreiser family was temporarily resident in the city and Dreiser was thirteen. Since several of his sisters were still alive in 1931, when Dawn was published, Dreiser disguised their names; in this account, Eleanor is his sister Mame, Ruth is Sylvia, and Janet is Emma, the model for Carrie.

I have described, for instance, how Eleanor came to Chicago and met Harahan, but not, I think, how he in turn introduced her and Ruth to the wealthy manufacturer who came to Evansville to visit Ruth. From all appearances, his courtship of Ruth, or at least his friendship with her, was sanctioned by my mother. Whether this was wise or unwise, I cannot say. He was much older, albeit a widower and wealthy. My one idea of it is that as usual my mother was at once strangely nebulous and optimistic. She had no ability to advise shrewdly in a situation of this kind, had she thought it important to advise. Being dubious of life and its various manifestations, I think that she thought it as well to let her daughters face their own problems—a view-point with which I find myself in agreement. Life is to be learned from life, and in no other way. That Ruth was obviously intrigued by this man I came to know when I chanced to enter the apartment one day when all the others were out and discovered her in his arms. By what arrangement, if any, he chanced to be there, I do not know. No doubt, she had calculated on the house being empty. At any rate, she requested me afterward to say nothing about it, and while I was shocked or moved in a strange way, I did as she wished. It seemed to me that my sister, being so much older, should be able to regulate her own life.

Similarly, Janet, who had been chided for her conduct this long while, had on coming to Chicago taken up with an able and well-to-do, though somewhat aged, architect, and was now living with him in a hotel on South Halstead Street. I recall her giving Ed and myself a meal ticket issued by a semi-public restaurant attached to this hotel and afterwards being invited to her rooms in the absence of the liege lord. I was filled with wonder at her clothes, furniture and the like, which seemed to contrast more than favorably with our own. Her boudoir dressing-table, for instance, was piled with

bright silver toilet articles and a closet into which I peered was plentifully supplied with clothes. Janet herself looked prosperous and cheerful. I remember going back through the grey, foggy streets of Chicago, looking at the huge sign-boards of the shows then playing: “Humpty Dumpty,” “Eight Bells”—and thinking how fine it all was.

Moral problems such as the lives of my several sisters presented to me had no great weight. And have not now—any more than do those of other men’s sisters or daughters. It is the way of life, however much socially it may be denied, concealed, or disguised. At times, assuming I heard someone else discussing them moralistically—my father, say—I was inclined to experience a depression or reduction in pride which was purely osmatic—a process of emotional absorption—no more. Had I heard someone else criticized, I would not have been so moved. And yet, at times, and because of this, I had the notion that they were not doing right; that men (this must have been gathered from my father’s many preachments) were using them as mere play-things; but most of the time I had a feeling that they were their own masters, or might be if they would. And that perhaps they enjoyed being playthings. Why not? And through it all ran the feeling that good, bad, or indifferent as individuals or things might be, life was a splendid surge, a rich sensation, and that it was fine to be alive. And in so far as my sister Janet was concerned, my final feeling was that she was prosperous and individual and perhaps as well off as some others, if not more so.

But to return to my sister Eleanor. Being in love and waiting to be taken over completely by Harahan, she was leading a trying, and yet to her, I assume, invaluable life. In later years I heard all about the love woes of this period; the eagerness for letters, the despair at not receiving them, the agony of suspecting other flirtations, and so on and so forth. Until at last she had found herself desperately in love with this man, as she once told me, she had been moderately entertained by the admirations and attentions of first one man and then another. But mere flirtations these—not complete sex relations. She had not been sufficiently interested. The thought that comes to me now, though, is that by reason of criticism on the part of others—taboos and the like—and however generally evaded or ignored—we do not prefer to contemplate these youthful sex variations, either in real life or in literature. And yet, how common! You may measure the thinness of literature and of moral dogma and religious control by your own observations and experiences. Look back over your own life and see!¹

LIFE IN CHICAGO

In two passages from Dawn Dreiser recalls his response—the first in the summer of 1884, the second in the summer of 1887—to the possibilities of life offered by Chicago, a response echoed by Carrie.

How shall one hymn, let alone suggest, a city as great as this in spirit? Possibly it had six or seven hundred thousand population at this time. To it, and at the rate of perhaps fifty thousand a year, were hurrying all of the life-hungry natives of a hundred thousand farming areas, of small cities and towns, in America and elsewhere. The American of this time, native, for the most past, of endless backwoods communities, was a naive creature, coming with all the notions which political charlatans of the most uninformed character had poured into his ears. He was gauche, green, ignorant. But how ambitious and courageous! (Think of our family!) Such bumptiousness! Such assurance! Such a mixture of illusions concerning God, the characteristics of the human animal, and himself! He was distinctly one thing the while he was ever imaging himself another.

Would that I might sense it all again! Would that I were able to suggest in prose the throb and urge and sting of my first days in Chicago! A veritable miracle of pleasing sensations and fascinating scenes. The spirit of Chicago flowed into me and made me ecstatic. Its personality was different from anything I had ever known; it was a compound of hope and joy in existence, intense hope and intense joy. Cities, like individuals, can flare up with a great flare of hope. They have that miracle, personality, which as in the case of the individual is always so fascinating and arresting.

I washed my face and brushed my clothes, and then knelt down by the window—because I could hang out farther by doing so—and looked out. East and west, for miles, as it seemed to me, was a double row of gas lamps already flaring in the dusk, and behind them the lighted faces of shops and, as they seemed to me, very brightly lighted, glowing in fact. And again, there were those Madison Street horse-cars, yellow in color, jingling to and fro, their horses’ feet plop-plopping as they came and went, just as they had when I sold papers here four years before. And the scores and scores of pedestrians walking in the rain, some with umbrellas, some not, some hurrying, some not. New land, new life, was what my heart was singing! Inside the street cars, like toy men and women, were the acclimated Chicagoans, those who had been here long before I came, no doubt. Beautiful! Like a scene in a play; an Aladdin view in the Arabian nights. Cars, people, lights, shops! The odor and flavor of the city, the vastness of its reaches, seems to speak or sing or tinkle like a living, breathing thing. It came to me again with inexpressible variety and richness, as if to say: “1 am the soul of a million people! I am their joys, their prides, their loves, their appetites, their hungers, their sorrows! 1 am their good clothes and their poor ones, their light, their food, their lusts, their industries, their enthusiasms, their dreams! In me are all the pulses and wonders and tastes and loves of life itself! I am life! This is paradise! This is that mirage of the heart and brain and blood of which people dream. I am the pulsing urge of the universe! You are a part of me, I of you! All that life or hope is or can be or do, this I am, and it is here before you! Take of it! Live, live, satisfy your heart! Strive to be what you wish to be now while you are young and of it! Reflect its fire, its tang, its color, its greatness! Be, be, wonderful or strong or great, if you will but be!”²

NEW YORK

Dreiser here discusses the extremes of wealth and poverty in New York; his reflections were occasioned by a bitterly contested strike in the summer of 1896 by sweatshop workers.

To those who are infatuated with the thought of living in a city and of enjoying the so called delights of metropolitan life, the recent strikes in the sweater shops [small, unregulated clothing factories] of New York may furnish a little food for reflection. Usually the thought of miles of streets, lined with glimmering lamps, of great, brilliant thoroughfares, thronged with hurrying pedestrians and lined with glittering shop windows; of rumbling vehicles rolling to and fro in noisy counter procession, fascinates and hypnotizes the mind, so that reason fades to an all-possessing desire to rush forward and join with the countless throng. Usually, to the mass of humans, the vision of a great metropolis, throbbing with ceaseless life, pulsating after the fashion of a great heart and extending its influence by means of tracks to all parts of the world, is one of the most inspiring and impressive visions imaginable. To go to the city is the changeless desire of the mind. To join in the great hurrying throng; to see the endless lights, the great shops and stores, the towering structures and palatial mansions, becomes a desire which the mind can scarcely resist. Mansions and palaces, libraries, museums, the many theatres and resorts of wealth and pleasure all attract, just as a great cataract attracts. There is a magnetism in nature that gives more to the many, and this you will see in the constant augmentation of population in the great cities, the constant rushing of wealth to those who have wealth, the great hurrying of waters to where there are endless waters and of stars where there are myriad of stars already gathered, until the heavens are white with them. It is a magnetism which no one understands, which philosophers call the law of segregation, and which simply means that there is something in nature to make the many wish to be where the many are. From that law there is no escape and both men and planets obey it. It makes towns, cities, nations, and worlds, and does nothing, perhaps except show what mites we are in the stream and current of nature.

This desire to attend and be part of the great current of city life is one that seldom bases itself upon well mastered reasons. It is simply a desire, and as such, seldom begs for explanation. Men do not ask themselves whether once in the great city its wonder will profit them any. They do not stop to consider whether the great flood will catch them up and whirl them on helpless and unheeded. They never consider that the life, and dash and fire of metropolitan life is based on something and not a mere exotic sprung from nothing and living on air. They seldom reflect that all here is a mere picture of wondrous, living detail, but as cold and helpless as any vision, and as far from their grasp as the gems of a wintry sky. If they did it would appall them and make them cautious of the magnetic charm that draws them on, for they would perhaps come to realize that men may starve at the base of cold, ornate columns of marble, the cost of which would support them and many like them for the remainder of their earthly days. All is not gold that glitters, nor will anything that delights your fancy give you food. Certainly the city glitters, but it is not always your gold.

Perceive first, that what delights you is only the outer semblance, the bloom of the plant. These streets and boulevards, these splendid mansions and gorgeous hotels, these vast structures about which thousands surge and toward which luxurious carriages roll, are the fair flowers of a rugged stalk. Not of color and softness and rare odor are the masses upon which as a stalk these bloom; not for fresh air and sunshine are they. Down in the dark earth are the roots, drawing life and strength and sending them coursing up the veins; and down in alleys and byways, in the shop and small dark chambers are the roots of this luxurious high life, starving and toiling the year through that carriages may roll and great palaces stand brilliant with ornaments. These endless streets which only present their fascinating surface are the living semblance of the hands and hearts that lie unseen within them. They are the gay covering which conceals the sorrow and want and ceaseless toil upon which all this is built. They hide the hands and hearts, the groups of ill-clad workers, the chambers stifling with the fumes of midnight oil consumed over ceaseless tasks, the pallets of the poor and sick, the bare tables of the hopeless slaves who work for bread. Endless are these rows of shadowy chambers, countless the miseries which these great halls hide. If they could be swept away, or dissolved, and only the individuals left in view, there would be a new story to tell. Like a sinful Magdalen the city decks itself gayly, fascinating all by her garments of scarlet and silk, awing by her jewels and perfumes, when in truth there lies hid beneath these a torn and miserable heart, and a soiled and unhappy conscience that will not be still but is forever moaning and crying, “for shame.”

The striking tailors, coat makers, pressers, bushelmen, they are of this vast substrata on which the city stands; a part of the roots that are down in the ground, delving, that the vast flowerlike institutions may bloom over head. They belong to that part of the city which is never seen and seldom heard. Strange tales could be told of their miseries, strange pictures drawn of their haunts and habitations, but that is not for here and now. When they issued their queer circular it was published as a curiosity because it told a strange and peculiar story, and to those who are fascinated by dreams of the great metropolis it may prove a lesson. All that glitters is not gold. Neither is the city a place of luxurious abode despite the brilliancy of its surging streets. Here is the circular:

Extra.

To the Pressers:

Brethren—The last hour of need, misery and hunger has come. We are now on the lowest step of the ladder of human life. We can do nothing more than starve. Take pity on your wives. Are not your children for whom you have struggled so hard with your sweat and blood, dear to you? Do you think you have a right to live? Do you think you ought to get pay for your work? We only strive for a miserable piece of bread.

Signed, Coat Pressers Union, No. 17.

There is surely no need for comment here, certainly no call for explanation. They are down there in narrow rooms working away again. The great thoroughfares are just as bright as ever. Thousands are lounging idly in cafes, thousands thronging the places of amusement, thousands rolling in gaily caparisoned equipages, and so it will continue. Some imagine that this condition can be done away with but it cannot. As well imagine that men can be made equal in brain, intelligence and perception, by law. As well imagine that this law of segregation which brings thousands together can be reversed, or that men can be made to desire complete isolation and solitude. Oppression can be avoided, that is true, but the vine must have roots else how are its leaves to grow high into the world of sunlight and air. Some must enact the role of leaves, others the role of roots, and as no one has the making of his brain in embryo he must take the result as it comes.

For those who are inclined to believe that the above is mere rhetorical sentiment, unwarranted by any facts, the fruits, as it were, of a morbid imagination, let an incident in point suffice. It would seem as though one who enters a stranger into a city, enters as into the gorgeous storehouse of that eastern king whose jewels were heaped in glittering masses, and upon which he was left chained and helpless to stare and starve. Endless jewels can this city show; treasures so vast as to seem improbable; glories so numerous that in their very number they rob each other of their individual charm; pleasure so elaborate and costly as to pall upon the pursuing imagination; yet, amid all, men starve. It strikes one as the acme of the paradoxical, but nevertheless court records do not lie. Of one such case the papers have spoken of recently, and the singular description is here presented as evidence. It says:

“A wretched, dwarfed specimen of masculine humanity picked up by the police late Monday night was brought into Jefferson Market Court yesterday charged with vagrancy. The creature had been seen lurking in back alleys of the neighborhood of Minetta Street, and persons whose curiosity had been aroused noticed that he spent his time rummaging in garbage cans under back stoops. Those who observed more closely declare that the man was devouring parts of the refuse. The man ate this because he was starving. Policeman McCarthy, of the Mercer Street Station, approached the wild-eyed, bushy-haired and shrunken outcast, whose clothes fell from him in rags, and he slunk away like a hunted animal. He had not gone far when he staggered and fell against a lamppost and cut his head. He then started to crawl into a hallway. The policeman found him and took him to the station house. The man, who was about 4 feet 3 inches high, was dreadfully emaciated. His hair was 18 inches long. His beard had been uncut and untrained for so long that little of his face could be seen. He wore no shirt, and was clad in a ragged coat and pair of tattered trousers. A pair of soles which had once belonged to shoes were tied to his feet. At the station he devoured soup and bread with an eagerness which showed his pitiable condition. When led before Magistrate Cornell yesterday he was still so weak he could scarcely stand. He is a native of the West Indies, and gave the name of William Wilson. He could not obtain work nor aid and was obliged to go to the garbage cans in trying to stave off starvation. Wilson was committed to the workhouse.”

Thus runs the dry description of one creature. Thus could be written the story of many another. And between this one and that topmost type, whose clothes are costly and delicate of texture; whose linen is ever immacu-late; whose chambers are soft with comforts and ever resplendent in detail; how many gradations are there? How many of the half hungry? the half weary? the half clothed? the half happy, are there? How many who endure severe privations uncomplaining, and how many who endure moderate wants with a trusting heart? Ah, this is a wonderful conglomerate world, filled with a million grades, and still a million, and the one cares not for the wants of another. There are shades of suffering as innumerable as the countless tints of a roseate sky; grades of poverty as various as the hues of a changeful sea. No type so faint but what there is one fainter still, and none so marked but that another more impressive rises. Indeed, they are as the sands of the desert, as the stars of the trackless night, and he who enters among them does so as one who ventures his frail craft amid the massive ships of a crowded sea; the idle rocking of which may insure his watery doom. But this is trite, perhaps; very wearisome, no doubt; very much like the threshing of straw upon a forsaken field.³

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

Dreiser here attempts to deal with the social implications of the Darwinian idea of life as a struggle for existence, a theme closely related to the fates of Carrie and Hurstwood.

The characteristic of the time is that men can shut themselves in or apart from the general life, and with some little feature selected from nature labor assiduously to accomplish distinction. It is called specialization now. They can either take a line of business or a line of art, or something equally specific and withdraw into themselves, giving all their energy and thought to the labor of attaining distinction. There is no fault to be found with this from the point of earthly progress,’ nor from belief that all mankind should work and accomplish something. It is the selfishness in it that ignores the efforts of others to accomplish something also, that is the forbidding feature. One would think that each might work and at the same time assist every other to work, as much as possible. Specialization, coupled with selfishness and an extreme desire to succeed speedily, is the very element that makes life diffi-cult. Speed is well, but it leaves no time to look about when others cry for assistance, nor will it permit a halt when someone has been trampled on. It leaves suffering and supplication, the drip of tears and the moan of prayers to die on the wind behind, while it rides rapidly on. That is the way men go forward these days. And they go singly in feeling, though to the eyes of the onlooker there are thousands in the same company.

Well, it may be best for the progress of the world that there should be such a wide gap between the very rich and the very poor, between the highly educated and the wholly uneducated; but the difference, coupled with the number of people, makes life a very fierce struggle. It may be necessary that some should drudge and slave, and others walk in elegance and conduct the more honored affairs of life, but it certainly makes a grind of things. The drudges are so numerous. It looks so often as though they were held down by a lack of advantages and that men might do more for them. They have to struggle so hard for bread. They have to wear such wretched clothes. Their days are all toil, and their nights weariness. They are hounded by their desire to taste a few of life’s pleasures, and by those who wish to sell them the mockery of these exorbitantly. They live in close, stifling quarters and sleep vilely. They are subject to results of droughts and panics, go hungry when crops fail, die when plagues come, and are tortured by sickness and suffering in its endless forms. One sees the city packed with them. The mills are filled with them, who are not half so valuable as the machines. They toil under the summer sun in grain fields, and suffer cold before the mast over all the wide seas as sailors. They are so numerous and there are no schools. They are so willing and there are no machines. They work hard and the product of their labor is stored up, and then they are turned out, because they have manufactured enough to last those who buy a long time.

With all this they are cursed with minds and hearts. They reason some, and think of their position. They have laughter and tears and those horrible things called nerves, and all the conditions play upon them. You can find dozens of them with full minds, fine-looking hands, graceful bodies, in every way equal to some of those who ride by outside in jingling equipages, crowded into one small, ill-smelling room, working unceasingly from morning to night. Their fingers fly, their eyes linger on their labor, they stoop, they never speak, and all day long they work, work, work, until they are yellow and faded and limp—and they are humans.

Who put them there? An eternal law. What makes them stay? Hunger, fear of death. Why don’t they do something else? They don’t know how. Why don’t they? They were never taught, never had the time, were made to work by parents whom they have been taught that they owe something to for being grown into such a condition. That is the great mass of creatures. They are nothing at all, a mere mass, worms hidden at the roots of the tree of life.

And this is the life they are expected to rise in. If they try they may succeed, but no one is going to help them. They are going to encounter enmity, that foremost characteristic of the ambitious, the moment they try. Everyone is trying. Everyone is pushing the other for place—is training that he may crowd the other out of the way, shove him back, put him below—that he may be first and free to go farther. If one of these strugglers tries for a higher place he may starve. Certainly he will be buffeted, as certainly hated, and persistently undermined. That is the character of ambition. It throttles its competitors.

Why should men struggle? Well, because they want to be somebody. They want nice clothes, nice hands, their bodies kept from showing wear and painful usage. They have inherited pride, and would like people to speak well of them. They would like to laugh, to feel merry, to have plenty to eat, a fine place to sleep, and to be healthy and admired. They would like a nice home, soft lights and shades in it, beautiful views in it, and the smiles of love. They would like to be favored of Providence and to have the things which they understand contribute to and make happiness, and why shouldn’t they? This understanding has never been educated out of them. Other people seek such. Why not they? With this feeling, inculcated by everything in their life and about them, they are tempted to try. They see how others set about it. They learn that one must save; furthermore, that one must seize upon all that can possibly be seized upon and hold it. They must not give anything from their store. They must hold; seize more; hold and seize still more; and so on to riches. Pleasure will come afterward. Love will come afterward, the ability to admire, to enjoy, to understand—oh! that will all come. First, get the money, that will buy the things to admire.

So it goes through all grades of life, from men to microbes, and the change is not visible. Virtue doesn’t seem to flourish exotically. Charity is not growing stronger or more pronounced, pity isn’t any more in evidence. At least it seems so at times, and although this strange, agonized turmoil seems more and more deadly, pity may be growing, human sympathy widening, charity coming more and more in evidence. If so, blessed be these quali-ties. May they thrive! A world agonized and despairing awaits its redemption, prostrate, at their hands.⁴

DOWN AND OUT IN NEW YORK

In this account of the death of a New York vagrant, Dreiser relates a common event in the city to his own personal experience in New York in the spring of 1903, and, by implication, back to his earlier portrayal of Hurstwood’s death.

“The Man on the Sidewalk”

An unidentified man, about fifty years old, dropped dead of heart failure yesterday in front of No. 309 Bowery. He was tall, thin, emaciated. He wore no overcoat, and his clothing was thin and shabby. There were seventy-two cents in his pocket.—Daily paper.

One of the most commonplace items of this, our city life, is one like the above, which records the falling from exhaustion, or the death by starvation, of some one who has reached the limit of his physical ability to cope with life. It is no longer a notable thing. It is so old, and frequently, as you may see, it is a trivial thing. The papers give it no more than a passing mention.

I like, at times, this brief way of recording the failure of an individual. It is so characteristic of the city, and of life as a whole. Nature is so grim. The city, which represents it so effectively, is also grim. It does not care at all. It is not conscious. The passing of so small an organism as that of a man or woman is nothing to it. Beside a star or a great force of any kind the beginning or end of a little body is so ridiculous and trivial, that it is almost like that of an insect or a worm.

And yet to the individual who is thus ground between the upper and the nether millstone of circumstance, the indifference of the city, and of the world and of life, comes as a terrible revelation. He learns that one may really die of starvation in a great city full of wealth, full of power, in a way full of sympathy (misdirected, perhaps). The houses with which the streets are lined may be full of the comfort which attaches to happiness; the stores and offices crowded with those who are industriously bettering their for-tunes. On every hand are piled up the evidences of wealth—great structures, well-stocked stores, energetic factories, and the masses of material for sale, which can only be had for a price, and yet you may die.

I remember entering a great city once when 1 had neither place to go nor where to stay. My clothes were poor and my purse empty. In addition, I was ill and despondent, and although I might and did attribute my misfor-tunes somewhat to my own indiscretions, that fact did not avail to amelio-rate my immediate needs. I wandered helplessly about, and in that period of passing distress, lasting over a month, I sank to the bottom of human misery.

It was in this hour that my soul tasted the very dregs of life’s little ironies. When in health and comfort my eyes had seen many things which my senses longed for. Now in illness and distress they were multiplied a thousandfold. The stores were no longer great economic institutions which were sensibly arranged to deal with accuracy and fair-mindedness in all that society requires, but holding-places merely of that which if secured would serve to immediately relieve my wants. It was impossible for me to look then in any window or to see any mass of food and not covet it earnestly—a fraction, just so much as would keep body and soul together, a mere handful. I could not help speculating on how little it would take to keep me alive, and how little it would cost the giver to give it. However, here, in my way, I found an inexorable law of trade—nothing for nothing. If I chose to beg there were endless explanations and bitter comments, without (always) satisfactory results. If I chose to steal, the hand of every man’ was against me. There was no immediate way.

And yet to recover my lost position, or my health, or my self-respect, or my friends, required not only food, but health and labor. Once I had fallen so low, a long wearisome struggle lay before me and I who had reached this place did not always think it worth while. Pride stood in my way when begging was conceived, sensitiveness and lack of strength in the way of a forceful struggle. So it came that often I looked the grim procession of circumstances in the face and wondered whether it was worth while.

However, about me was noising and flaunting what to me, in my troubled state, appeared as a perfect pandemonium of joy. Everybody seemed happy, everybody seemed well pleased. There were inspiring processions of those who were going to business, to the theatres, to the cafes, to the homes—to all the beautiful and interesting things which the world contains, and I, only I, was going nowhere. Not to a good home, or a good business, or a good restaurant, or a good friend—to nothing at all except loneliness and friendlessness. Of such was my portion of poverty.

And so it was borne in upon me how it comes to those who reach the lowest level of distress sometimes die of starvation. The world does not care. It does not understand. It is busy adding to, not taking away from its store, and that which you seek to do in the extremes of poverty is to take away. You have nothing to give. It is only when you are well and strong that you have that.

Therefore it is that in those short, crisp items I see displayed the world of misery which lies behind them, the heart aches, the brain aches, the sad lookings with hungry eyes, the trampings, the waitings—all that poverty means in heat and cold. If nature were not obviously something which invariably works through other things, you would expect it, in its boundless ability, to flash succor out of the sky; but, alas! only the medium of other people (nature’s tools) are there to appeal to. Men are its mediums— men and things. And it came to me as a flash of wisdom that these are useless except as they are charitable; and that it behooves us to keep a kindly heart within our bosom and an open eye, for who knows but that at our door, even now, may knock with a wavering impulse that boundless wretchedness which but for our generosity and tenderness must travail and die, unthought of, unheeded, even as those whose failures and death are here so immaterially recorded.⁵

THE “SUPPRESSION” OF SISTER CARRIE

Written during the depression caused in part by his difficul-ties with Doubleday, Page and Company over the publication of Sister Carrie, “True Art Speaks Plainly” expresses Dreiser’s anger toward “the so-called judges of the truth or morality” of a novel, an anger that helped fuel his lifelong preoccupation with the affair. The essay also reflects Dreiser’s dismay over those reviewers of the novel who decried its sexual themes.

“True Art Speaks Plainly”

The sum and substance of literary as well as social morality may be expressed in three words—tell the truth. It matters not how the tongues of the critics may wag, or the voices of a partially developed and highly conventionalized society may complain, the business of the author, as well as of other workers upon this earth, is to say what he knows to be true, and, having said as much, to abide the result with patience.

Truth is what is: and the seeing of what is, the realization of truth. To express what we see honestly and without subterfuge: this is morality as well as art.

What the so-called judges of the truth or morality are really inveighing against most of the time is not the discussion of mere sexual lewdness, for no work with that as a basis could possibly succeed, but the disturbing and destroying of their own little theories concerning life, which in some cases may be nothing more than a quiet acceptance of things as they are without any regard to the well-being of the future. Life for them is made up of a variety of interesting but immutable forms and any attempt either to picture any of the wretched results of modern social conditions or to assail the critical defenders of the same is naturally looked upon with contempt or aversion.

It is true that the rallying cry of the critics against so-called immoral literature is that the mental virtue of the reader must be preserved; but this has become a house of refuge to which every form of social injustice hurries for protection. The influence of intellectual ignorance and physical and moral greed upon personal virtue produces the chief tragedies of the age, and yet the objection to the discussion of the sex question is so great as to almost prevent the handling of the theme entirely.

Immoral! Immoral! Under this cloak hides the vices of wealth as well as the vast unspoken blackness of poverty and ignorance; and between them must walk the little novelist, choosing neither truth nor beauty, but some half-conceived phase of life that bears no honest relationship to either the whole of nature or to man.

The impossibility of any such theory of literature having weight with the true artist must be apparent to every clear reasoning mind. Life is not made up of any one phase or condition of being, nor can man’s interest possibly be so confined.

The extent of all reality is the realm of the author’s pen, and a true picture of life, honestly set down, is both moral and artistic whether it offends the conventions or not.⁶

AN INTERVIEW WITH DREISER

Dreiser’s interview with a New York Times reporter in 1907, when Sister Carrie was republished, provided him with an opportunity to restate his literary creed while expressing his continuing anger over the failure of critics to understand his intent in the novel.

“The mere living of your daily life,” says Theodore Dreiser, “is drastic drama. To-day there may be some disease lurking in your veins that will end your life to-morrow. You may have a firm grasp on the opportunity that in a moment more will slip through your fingers. The banquet of to-night may crumble to the crust of the morning. Life is a tragedy.”

“But isn’t that a rather tragic view to take?” 1 asked. “Hasn’t each man something in himself that makes life worth living? If, as you say, you want to write more than anything else, isn’t that power or ability to write something that would make life worth while under all circumstances?”

“No, not under all circumstances, because you can’t use ability except under certain favorable circumstances. The very power of which you speak may, thwarted, only serve to make a man more miserable. I have had my share of the difficulties and discouragements that fall to the lot of most men. 1 know something of the handicap of ill health and the necessary diffusion of energy. A man with something imperative to say and no time or strength for the saying of it is as unfortunate as he is unhappy. 1 look into my own life and I realize that each human life is a similar tragedy. The infinite suffering and deprivation of great masses of men and women upon whom existence has been thrust unasked appalls me. My greatest desire is to devote every hour of my conscious existence to depicting phases of life as 1 see and understand them.”

“What are you trying to show in what you write? Do you point out a moral?” I inquired.

“I simply want to tell about life as it is. Every human life is intensely interesting. If the human being has ideals, the struggle and the attempt to realize those ideals, the going back on his own trail, the failure, the success, the reason for the individual failure, the individual success—all these things are interesting, interesting even when there are no ideals, where there is only the personal desire to survive, the fight to win, the stretching out of the fingers to grasp—these are the things I want to write about—life as it is, the facts as they exist, the game as it is played! I said that 1 was pointing out no moral. Well, I am not, unless this is a moral—that all humanity must stand together and war against and overcome the forces of nature. I think a time is coming when personal gain will rarely be sought at the expense of some one else.”

“Where among people is there the greatest readiness to stand by one another, among the rich or the poor?” I asked.

“Among the poor. They are by far the most generous. They are never too crowded to take in another person, although there may be already three or four to share the same room. Their food they will always share, even though there is not enough to go around.”

“Are you writing anything else?” I inquired.

“I have another book partly finished, but I don’t know when I shall get it done. I have not the time to work on it, much as I want to.”

“Have you been satisfied with the reception of ’Sister Carrie’?”

“Well, the critics have not really understood what I was trying to do. Here is a book that is close to life. It is intended not as a piece of literary craftsmanship, but as a picture of conditions done as simply and effectively as the English language will permit. To sit up and criticize me for saying ‘vest’ instead of waistcoat, to talk about my splitting the infinitive and using vulgar commonplaces here and there, when the tragedy of a man’s life is being displayed, is silly. More, it is ridiculous. It makes me feel that American criticism is the joke which English literary authorities maintain it to be. But the circulation is beginning to boom. When it gets to the people they will understand, because it is a story of real life, of their lives.”⁷

THE MYTH OF THE “SUPPRESSION”

Fremont Older, a San Francisco newspaperman, had written Dreiser inquiring about the suppression of Sister Carrie. In his reply of 27 November 1923, Dreiser faultily recalls several events in his relations with Doubleday, Page, but this account nevertheless is the version of the story surrounding the publication of the novel that was widely accepted for many years.

Dear Mr. Older:

I feel like beginning “’tis a sad story, mates.” I finished Sister Carrie in the spring of 1900. It was written at 6 West 102^nd Street, N. Y., by the way. I was a free-lance magazine contributor at the time and was over-persuaded by a young literary friend of mine who was convinced 1 could write a novel even when I knew that I couldn’t. Once done, however, after many pains and aches, I took it to Harper and Brothers, who promptly rejected it. Then I took it to Doubleday, Page, & Co. At that time Doubleday had newly parted from McClure and had employed Frank Norris as a reader of manuscripts. It was Norris who first read the book. He sent for me and told me quite enthusiastically that he thought it was a fine book, and that he was satisfied that Doubleday would be glad to publish it, but that more time for a final decision would be required. Subsequent to this, because he wanted to go on record in the matter, 1 presume, he wrote me a warm and very kindly letter praising the book, which I still have.

About a week or ten days later I had a letter from Walter H. Page, the late ambassador, who asked me to call. And when I came he congratulated me on the character of the work and announced that it was to be accepted for publication, and that he would send me a contract which I was to sign. Also, because he appeared to like the work very much, he announced that no pains would be spared to launch the book properly, and that,—(the glorious American press agent spirit of the day, I presume)—he was thinking of giving me a dinner, to which various literary people would be invited in order to attract attention to the work and to me. Being very young, very green, and very impressionable, this brought about very ponderous notions as to my own importance which might just as well have been allowed to rest, particularly in the light of what followed.

For this so stirred me that I decided to be about the work of another novel,—to join the one a year group, which seemed to be what was expected of me. And to this end I scraped together a little cash and retired to the country. Frank Doubleday, the head of the house, was in England at the time. In my absence he returned and hearing, as I was afterwards informed, that the book was much thought of, decided to read it or, at least, have it read for himself. Accordingly as Norris and later William Heinemann of London informed me, he took the book home and gave it to his wife. Being of a conventional and Victorian turn, I believe—(I have always been told so)—she took a violent dislike to the book and proceeded to discourage her husband as to its publication. He in turn sent for me and asked me to release him from the contract which had already been signed. His statement to me was that he did not like the book and would not publish it.

My personal wish was to take the book under my arm and walk out, of course. But before his letter had arrived I had been reached by Frank Norris as well as by some other individual then connected with the house,—a second reader, I believe, both of whom, for some strange reason urged me not to take the book away but to stand on the contract—of all silly things—and to insist that the house publish it. Norris’s argument was that once the book was published and distributed to the critics the burst of approval which was sure to follow would cause Doubleday to change his mind and decide to push the book. He even took me in to Walter Page, who announced after some discussion that he thought this course might not be inadvisable. He appeared somewhat uncertain, but since Norris was so interested, he thought it might be all right.

And for this reason, and no other, 1 decided to do as Norris said, feeling, however, as 1 did at the time, that my position was wrong—ridiculous. It was true that the summer was allowed to go by and the date of issue was comparatively near at hand, but still I might have easily gotten the book published elsewhere if I had not been so silly as to do this. And Doubleday finding that I wished to stand by the contract, announced very savagely one day that he would publish the book but that was all that he would do. I returned to Norris, who said in substance,—“Never mind. He’ll publish it. And when it comes out I’ll see that all the worth-while critics are reached with it. Then, when he sees what happens he’ll change. It’s only his wife anyhow, and Page likes it.”

When the book came out Norris did exactly as he said. He must have written many letters himself for I received many letters commenting on the work and the resulting newspaper comment was considerable. However, as Mr. Thomas McKee, who was then the legal counsel for Doubleday afterwards told me, Doubleday came to him and wanted to know how he could be made safe against a law suit in case he suppressed the book—refused to distribute or sell any copies. And McKee advised him that he could not be made safe—that I had my rights under the contract which could be enforced by me if I were so minded. Nevertheless, as he told me, Doubleday stored all of the 1,000 printed—minus three hundred distributed by Norris—in the basement of his Union Square plant, and there they remained, except for a number abstracted, until 1905, when I, having obtained work as an editor, finally decided to buy the plates and all bound copies. In the meantime, I had carried the bound book from publisher to publisher hoping to find someone who would take it over without cost to them, but I could not find anyone. In turn, Appleton’s, Stokes, Scribner’s, Dodd-Mead, A. S. Barnes, and others promptly rejected it. In after years I heard many curious tales as to the internal commotion this particular book caused in all of the houses.

But here is an interesting bit for your private ear. At the time of my first conversation with Frank Doubleday, I referred to the fact that not only Norris but Mr. Page were heartily for the book, and that Mr. Page had told me that not only would he be pleased to publish the book but that he proposed to make quite a stir about it,—in fact that he had suggested getting up a dinner for me. This seemed to irritate Doubleday not a little, and walking into the next room where Page was sitting at the time at his desk, and asking me to follow him, he said: “Page, did you say to Mr. Dreiser that you really like the book very much and that you intended to make a stir about and give him a dinner?” And Mr. Page calmly looked at me and replied, “I never said anything of the kind.”

He was a man of about forty-five years of age, I should have said, at that time. I was just twenty-nine and not a little over-awed by editors and publishers in general. In consequence, although I resented this not a little, I merely got up and walked out. It seemed astounding to me that a man in his position would do such a thing. At the same time, I gathered from his manner and facial expression at the time that he stood not a little in awe of Doubleday. Also that finding Doubleday violently opposed to the book, he did not think it worth while to quarrel with him on this score. It was easier to dispense with me in the above manner.

Afterward—in 1901—Norris, personally, sent the book to Heinemann in London. And he published it. And it was much talked of there. Later Heinemann came to the United States and looked me up and gave me a dinner. At that dinner he told me how only the night before he and Mrs. Doubleday had actually quarreled over the book, principally because he made it plain that he considered her opinion of no great import. He stated that for some reason she appeared to be very bitter in regard to it all. Adverse critical comment, I believe.

In 1907, having by then laid aside sufficient cash for the purpose, I bought a third interest in the B. W. Dodge Company, then being organized, and, as a member of the firm, took the liberty of reissuing the book from the old plates. It sold about ten thousand copies. The next year a ten thousand edition was printed by Grosset and Dunlap, and sold for fifty cents a copy. In 1910, having finished Jennie Gerhardt, I took the book to Harper’s, and that firm asked to be allowed to reissue Sister Carrie as a companion volume to Jennie Gerhardt, and at that time it sold some seven thousand copies more—at $1.50 per copy. Since then it has sold continuously, the average annual sale something over a thousand copies.

To this I set my hand and seal.

Theodore Dreiser⁸

JENNIE GERHARDT

The following is an excerpt of an interview stemming from the publication of Jennie Gerhardt in early October 1911.

“Now Comes Author Theodore Dreiser Who Tells of 100,000 Jennie Gerhardts”

“There is no intelligent sequence of cause and effect in life,” says Theodore Dreiser,- explaining his philosophy of life as brought out in the struggles of Jennie Gerhardt. “Life is not reasonable. All our actions are regulated by some previous happening. If Senator Brander had not died, he would have married Jennie Gerhardt, unless some other accident had happened to prevent it. And if he had married her, society would have been none the wiser, and she would not have been ostracized for her fault.

“But that one thing, for which no one was responsible, left her at the mercy of her friends and called down upon her their so-called righteous indignation. It shows how little influence reason has over us as compared with chance.”

“Isn’t that rather pessimistic?” I asked.

“It may sound so at first,” returned Mr. Dreiser, “but it doesn’t affect me that way. I don’t feel any less happy about life on account of it. Life interests me intensely for that very reason. It is dramatic. It is more thrilling than the most gorgeous spectacle that man ever planned. And these accidents merely serve to make it more entrancing. I consider the beggar sitting by the road-side one of the most dramatic things that could be imagined. He has a precarious existence and it depends entirely on chance. It is really thrilling to see the way in which he ekes out a living.

“Besides being dramatic, I consider life beautiful, and 1 believe that beauty is eternal. If I didn’t, this feverish existence would be intolerable to me. As it is, I think the beggar I just mentioned is beautiful. His dirt and his rags, his bandaged feet and his sores are all beautiful to me. They are artistic. They complete the picture and make the whole perfect. It may not be pleasant, if you like, but it is artistic. Everything in life appears to me just that way. That would be the reason for life, if there were any reason. But I believe that life is merely an accident from the beginning.”

“If there is no other force than chance, how do you account for the progress of humanity?” I asked.

“I do not believe that there is such a thing as progress, in the sense that we use the word. It is merely a change. Who can say that it is better to worship the home as we do today than it was in the old days to worship a bull? Our ideas have changed, that is all. We believe that it is better for us to worship the home, but that does not mean that it would have been better for people of other times to worship the home instead of the bull or the spider. It may be wise in the present day to try to educate our sons in the teachings of Jesus Christ and keep our daughters virtuous, but we cannot say that it will always be our principle. I cannot believe that the teachings of Christ are eternal; that they have really held for two thousand years. It certainly isn’t true in this day that one should turn the other cheek. . . .”

“Jennie Gerhardt” is a worthy successor to “Sister Carrie” and develops further the philosophy of chance as it was advanced in the earlier book. Mr. Dreiser has not had these views always. He admits that in his youth he was just as bound up in traditions and conventions as any one else. But his ideas changed as he got older, and a wider experience gave him a broader view of life. He was born in Terre Haute, Ind., but went to Chicago early and started to work there.

“I cannot say just what I thought of things then. Life was a drift, a swirl. 1 read a great deal then. I was eagerly devouring Emerson, Hawthorne, and Stevenson at that time. But better than these books were the tall smoke-stacks, the crowded streets, the boxes and bales and the river and lake of Chicago. I loved these and the knowledge that I was young and alive. The glory of life cannot be put into books. It cannot be even faintly suggested.

“Then I got into newspaper work and that gave me an insight into the brutalities of life—the police courts, the jails, the houses of ill-repute, trade failures and trickery. Curiously, it all seemed wonderful to me—not sad. It was like a grand magnificent spectacle. All at once I began reading Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and life began to take on a new aspect. As they say in the slang of the day, I got a line on it. I shall never forget Spencer’s chapter on the Unknowable in ‘First Principles.’ I was torn up root and branch by it. Life disappeared in a strange fog.

“Just about then, in Pittsburg, where I was working as a newspaper man, I came across Balzac and then I saw what life was—a rich, gorgeous, showy spectacle. It was beautiful, dramatic, sad, delightful, and epic—all those things combined. I saw for the first time how a book should be written. I saw how, if I ever wrote one, I should write it. I did not expect to write like Balzac, but to use his method of giving a complete picture of life from beginning to end.

“Balzac lasted me a year or two, then came Hardy, and after him, Tolstoi. From them I learned what, in my judgment, really great books are. In later years Daudet, Flaubert, Turgenieff, and now only recently De Maupassant and George Moore have added to this knowledge. I have never read a line of Zola, unfortunately.”

“Which do you consider the world’s greatest books?” I asked.

Mr. Dreiser leaned forward and named them off on his fingers.

“I rank ‘Anna Karenina,’ ‘Madame Bovary,’ ‘Evelyn Innes,’ ‘Fathers and Children,’ Père Goriot, ‘The Woodlanders,’ and our great own American ‘Quicksand,’ by Hervey White, as among the great books of the world.”⁹

THE COWPERWOOD TRILOGY

Dreiser later incorporated the basic theme of the following article into the significant passage early in The Financier in which the youthful Frank Cowperwood derives his operative philosophy of life from a visit to an aquarium.

“A Lesson from the Aquarium”

When you are at the Aquarium if you will watch the glass swimming tanks containing the stort minnows, the hermit crabs or the shark suckers, you will be able to gather a few interesting facts concerning life, which may help to illuminate your daily career for you. In the first of these cases are small, brilliantly colored fishes whose lines show a striking pattern of purple and blue, with here and there a touch of salmon, as they turn swiftly in the light. They look as if they were only swimming about and enjoying themselves, nosing each other in hide-and-seek. In fact, they are engaged in a very serious business of life or death. If you examine closely you will see four or more on guard over nests in the bottom of the tank. The others are trying to rob them of their possessions. The watchmen do not have a moment’s rest. Hundreds of their brethren are hovering and crowding round them, constantly slipping into their domain. As they dart open-mouthed at one offender, another, and many others, will shoot in from the side, where the weeds are, or from the top, where no one is watching, and begin to rummage among the pebbles for the eggs. If the guards do not immediately descend on them they will rob the nests. If they do, the invaders will go away peaceably. The desire to fight is less than that to dine.

These fish band together in a kind of offensive and defensive alliance. Each guard has but one side from which attack can come. The other sides are protected by the operations of his three companions. The other guards, since they are in the same peril, can be trusted implicitly. You will never see one guard attack another, though they sometimes collide in the pursuit of interlopers, and always overreach into each other’s territory. They never molest or violate one another’s nests, and in the excitement of the struggle, when scores of marauders are swooping down at once, and they are dashing in all directions among them, nipping to the right and the left, they never mistake an ally for an enemy. Their duty is to guard the development of the new life intrusted to them, and in the prosecution of this labor they even drive the mothers away, which would hint that the latter may eat their own eggs. Needless to say, they are in no great personal danger from the intruding crowd, for the latter have been, or may expect to be, guards themselves some day. They wish only to eat, and in the gratification of the desire they exhibit a degree of good nature, or cavalier indifference, which is amusing. If a guard is on the lookout, they will not disturb him. If not, they will eat his eggs. Even the guards themselves share this desire, for once they are off duty—that is, when the eggs are hatched—they give a defiant flip of their tails and look about for their neighbors’ nests. Their role as guardians of public morality are for the time discontinued.

The case of the hermit crab offers an even more interesting example of how the game of life is fought. These soft, spidery creatures, not having been furnished by nature with any protection of their own, are forced by the craving other creatures have to eat them to find some protection for themselves. As soon as he is hatched he hustles around at the bottom of the sea, and finding a very small snail, weaker than himself, pounces on it and drags it summarily forth. Then he crawls in its shell and is protected.

However, this is not for long. He grows, the shell becomes too small for him. It is then necessary for him to make another sortie; and you may frequently see in this tank the operation of the law of the survival of the fittest, that makes our world so grim. One will come scrambling along the bottom of the tank, carrying his ill-fitting house on his back, in quest of food and a more suitable shell. If he cannot find a snail to oust, he will sometimes seize a fellow-crab, whose shell is of a suitable size, and he will worry and torment him until, by a process of poking and scratching, he finally succeeds in causing the crab to put his head and shoulders out in self-defense. He clutches the weaker brother and the struggle causes him to drop his shell. The victor drops his own shell, grabs that of his defeated kindred and scuttles off. The brandishing of claws and the grimaces that accompany the struggle are sometimes very amusing.

Now the vanquished hermit must get a new home. He takes hold of the shell which the other has abandoned. Finding it too small he hurries on, peeping frantically into this shell, poking eagerly at that, hoping to find one untenanted or with an occupant too feeble to defend himself. In the latter event he practices the same annoying tactics that were used on him. If he succeeds, his trouble is passed to the next one. If he loses, heaven defend him. Even now a monster has spied him, or, it may be, he has poked his claw into the wrong shell. It closes. He is grasped by a strong arm. A short, furious struggle ensues. He is pulled irresistibly in and devoured, a victim of what is sometimes called benevolent assimilation.

In the last tank, that of the shark-sucker, you will find an example of the true parasite—the child of fortune who knows just enough to realize that he is weak, and who is willing to attach himself to anyone more powerful than he, in order that he may have some of the good things left after his master has eaten. This curious creature attaches itself to the belly of a shark, and lives on the morsels that fall from its mouth. It is about a foot long, and remotely resembles a three-pound pickerel on its back. Its belly is slightly curved upward, and comes to an edge like the keel of a boat. Its back is flat and on it is an oblong, saucer-like sucker, which enables it to fasten itself to the shark. When it is quite young its habitat is fixed by the location of its parents. It is born in the company of sharks and it dies in the company of them. The fact that it might be able to do something for itself never seems to occur to it.

As might be expected, it never does well when loose from its master or held in captivity. The one in the tank lies in the sand, exactly in the same position it would have if it were fastened to a shark. It protrudes its ugly point of a nose, with its slit of a mouth just behind, and waits for food to be dropped down. It will not skirmish and seek anything for itself. Rather it lies here, and if not fed, starves, a fine example of the parasite the world over.

Do not these examples furnish excellent illustrations of our own physical and social condition? What set of capitalists, or captains of industry, think you, controlling a fine privilege or franchise, which they wish to hatch into a large fortune would not envy the stort minnows their skill in driving enemies away? What sharper prowling about and viewing another’s comfortable home, or his excellent business, or the beauty of his wife, if the desire seized him, would not seize upon one or all of these, and by a process of mental gymnastics, or physical force, not unlike that of the hermit crab, endeavor to secure for himself the desirable shell? What weakling, seeing the world was against him, and that he was not fitted to cope with it, would not attach himself, sucker-wise, to any magnate, trust, political or social (we will not call them sharks), and content himself with what fell from the table?

Bless us, how curiously these lesser creatures do imitate us in action— or how curiously we copy them! The very air we breathe seems to correspond to their sea, and as for the tragedy of it—but we will not talk of the tragedy of it. Let us leave the Aquarium.¹⁰

This statement, written during the period when Dreiser was working on the first two volumes of The Cowperwood Trilogy, remained unpublished during his lifetime.

“A Confession of Faith”

I.

I believe in an insoluble, indestructible universe, good undoubtedly, but past all understanding. I do not believe in a father, son, or a holy ghost as these terms are conjoined. They may be. 1 have no inward conviction of them. I believe in the theory of evolution as it relates to this mortal state. What relation that state bears to the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent intelligence in which I do believe, I do not know. I am inclined to believe that it is all a dream and that “there is no life, truth, intelligence nor substance in matter.”¹¹

II.

I believe that the first and crucial principle of life is change and that all human forms and all human institutions, and all human beliefs are subject to it. It is a current of all times, holden of the masses, that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are and that they do not change. The contrary is true. If you leave a new house alone it will soon be old; if you leave a great institution alone it will soon lose its significance; if you leave a human law alone it will become obsolete. There are laws and principles which relate to the universe and which, apparently, do not change. We do not know. I have

faith to believe that the principles of beauty are eternal. Else were this feverish existence unendurable to me.

III.

I believe in the inspiration and genius of men—intoxication of beauty—and of this intoxication I call all revered names in testimony,—Buddha, Zoroaster, the Prophets, Christ, St. Paul, Socrates, and all who have dreamed or sung or worked deeds of mercy and beauty in the history of the world. I believe that there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists some strange link between beauty and happiness; between kindness and a sense of peace; and between a magnanimous and thoughtful policy and public welfare and prosperity. That this has any close relationship to individual thoughts and deeds from hour to hour and from day to day I do not know.

IV.

I believe in the supremacy of art and that from first to last and from everlasting to everlasting the universe is artistic. I believe that in art there is neither high nor low; wretched nor distinguished; pure nor vile; but that all in their proper relationship are beautiful and good to look upon. We see but little and having ears hear not. I believe that this art is above the willing of man and that fortunate is he who is called to be its humblest servitor.

V.

I believe in the essential evil (so called) and the essential goodness of man at one and the same time. I believe that all men are liars, robbers, bearers of false witness, murderers, lechers, ingrates, and the like in part and I believe at the same time they are kind, gentle, peaceful, longsuffering, truthful, noble and self sacrificing. 1 believe that good and evil are variously compounded in us all and that but for the accident of chance we might be anything but that we aspire to—either good or evil. I believe that time and change happen to all men.

VI.

I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. 1 believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.

VII.

I believe in the necessity and dignity of labor for everyone. It is the only solvent of life’s woes.

VIII.

I believe that we should believe in change, that we should look at life searchingly, work energetically, love joyously and hope eternally. That we can at all times do this, I do not believe.

IX.

1 hope that I shall never cease to hope; that life in all its glory shall pass as a cloud at last; that I shall not live clear minded to see that which I have loved so much become the witness of an inane and futile age.¹²

In this unsigned interview Dreiser discusses the genesis of Frank Cowperwood and the significance of the American financier in the post—Civil War era.

“Theodore Dreiser Now Turns to High Finance”

The race for wealth at the pace set in America has interested Theodore Dreiser, novelist and philosopher. The author of “Jennie Gerhardt” and “Sister Carrie” has been devoting a long period of thought and study to a dramatic picture of exploitation of high finance, particularly in the reckless years following the civil war.

In his forthcoming novel, “The Financier,” which is to be issued on October 24 by his publishers, Harper & Brothers, Mr. Dreiser traces the evolution of a “Napoleon of Finance” from small beginnings before the war to vast dealings which include banks and street railways and close alliance with politics.

The book covers a wide field, and those who know Mr. Dreiser’s work know the characteristic breadth and force of his treatment. The new field which he has entered has piqued the curiosity of readers who have learned to regard him as the leading exponent of the newer school of realistic art, and an interview was sought with the author of “Jennie Gerhardt” in order to obtain some information about his new work, “The Financier.” The title clearly indicated a distinct difference in theme from his former books, and this prompted the first question.

“Have you not changed your field of work, Mr. Dreiser?”’

“Yes, to a certain extent. But ’Sister Carrie’ came very near being a man’s book, and I think if I had it to do over that I would now make it one. Nevertheless as it is I think it gives satisfactory evidence that my tendency was to make an elaborate study of a man.

“In ‘The Financier’ I have not taken a man so much as I have a condition, although any one who follows the detailed study of Cowperwood’s life would fancy perhaps that it was more a man than a condition that I was after. It has always struck me that America since the civil war in its financial and constructive tendencies has represented more the natural action of the human mind when it is stripped of convention, theory, prejudice, and belief of any kind than almost any period in the world’s history.

“In Rome about the date of the accession of the emperors we have an illustration of the strange, forceful ruthlessness of the human mind when it has freed itself from old faiths and illusions, and has not accepted any new ones. There you get mental action spurred by desire, ambition, vanity, without any of the moderating influences which we are prone to admire—sympathy, tenderness, and fair play.

“Many of the emperors were murdered, as the ordinary schoolboy knows, and thereafter the world passed into the shadowy realm of religious belief which endured until the Renaissance. Thereafter the amazing figure of medieval Italy appeared, including such astounding personalities as Machiavelli, Alexander VI, Caesar Borgia and others. There again you have the direct action of the human mind untrammeled by our so-called sense of justice and unmodified in the matter of ambition by any faith or any fear.

“There have been other periods, but few so glitteringly significant until we arrive at the year 1865 A. D. and thereafter. Then here in America we began to breed a race of giants acting directly, wholly financial in their operations, because finance was the one direct avenue to power and magnificence.

“Such men as Rockefeller, H. H. Rogers, Jay Gould, William H. Vanderbilt, E. H. Harriman and perhaps Russell Sage, are conspicuous examples. They knew no law and they would smile with contempt on anyone who did. I do not think that the mind of H. H. Rogers or John D. Rockefeller or E. H. Harriman was far removed from that of either Alexander VI, Caesar Borgia, Machiavelli, or to go back to the Roman Empire, any one of twenty emperors, including Galba and Nero.

“Our giants have been strong, eager, enthusiastic and without compunction. They have taken where they could, and silenced their victims with a bludgeon or ignored their cries. It is nothing new in the world; it will never be old or new. It will be simply different. New times make new methods and new conditions. Our Americans have looked straight at what they wished to do and have proceeded without let or hindrance to secure it.

“It is this atmosphere that I have begun to indicate in ‘The Financier.’ That book is not a complete picture. The full matter, if it could be condensed into one volume, would give possibly an interesting and I hope dramatic interpretation of what has been and still is happening. If I had the time and strength I would select other characters illustrating the same tendency under other conditions. If this is a change from my older method then 1 have changed.”

“What is the theme of ‘The Financier,’” asked the interviewer.

“I have fairly indicated it in just what I have said. The locale is Philadelphia, the period about 1847 to 1873, the character a national type, the conditions not different except in detail from those that have occurred in San Francisco, St. Louis, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. I only hope they are accurate. Aside from a few specific details with which most of us are familiar the color and the characters of the story are created out of whole cloth.

“I spent some time in Philadelphia studying the location of the scenes and familiarizing myself with the machinery of local government, but beyond that I guessed, as I had a right to do. The political atmosphere is simply typical, not accurate. The historical dates, in the main, are correct. I spent most of my time reading of financial characters of one kind or another to familiarize myself with the workings of finance sufficiently to make it intelligent without giving so much accurate detail that nobody would read it.”

“Is it typical, do you think, of American finance in connection with public service?”

“Fairly, so, yes, I believe there have been many worse conditions than I have described. The machinations of Cowperwood are child’s play so far as the Philadelphia end of the story is concerned as compared with the subtle manipulation of financiers in other cities, and even in Philadelphia at a slightly later period.”

“Does your book attempt to picture the civil war?”

“Not at all. Most of the financiers of whom Cowperwood is a fair representative were not interested in the civil war nor the question of slavery or any matter of human right. They were concerned as to what avenues of personal profit the war might open to them. P. D. Armour, for example, got his start by realizing that because of the war pork would be in great demand. It went I think to $9 a barrel. Consequently he stored pork until he had a corner and found himself rich. This is but a single instance. I drew on the civil war just enough to show that this was the attitude that was taken. And the introduction of the figure of Lincoln is merely to prove what I have just said.”

“Did your preparation for ‘The Financier’ require a great deal of time?”

“In all about a year. My greatest difficulty was in acquiring a working knowledge of finance and getting accurately the mental point of view of the proper character. I found a history called a ‘Day by Day History of Philadelphia’ to be of considerable value and the biographies and autobiographies of such men as Daniel Drew, Jay Cooke and others.

“I owe a great deal of gratitude to a private collection of newspaper clippings that was open to me and which covered many phases of the data I was seeking. It was no trouble to indicate the atmosphere of Philadelphia, although I have never lived there. Most of the histories of that city give a very good picture. My greatest difficulty was in making the machinery of my story work so that it gives a sense of movement and not of a vast complicated structure without life.”

“What will be the character of your next book?”

“I shall probably follow the evolution indicated in ‘The Financier.’ Naturally a story which deals with finance and which has its beginning since ‘73 and carries its life to the present hour, or nearly so, would be more involved, more ruthless and more orgiastically magnificent than one located between 1847 and 1873. But I do not know that it would be more human or have more of an intellectual or passional appeal.”¹³

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

In 1934 Robert Edwards murdered his pregnant sweetheart when he fell in love with another girl. The case was called “another American Tragedy,” and Dreiser was commissioned by the New York Post to write a series of articles on it. In revised and expanded form, these also appeared in Mystery Magazine in 1935. Dreiser opens the first of his Mystery Magazine essays with a discussion of the ways in which the drive for wealth in America led seemingly average Ameri-cans to commit violent crimes. He then goes on to an account of the origin of his interest in cases of this kind, an interest culminating in the writing of An American Tragedy.

“I Find the Real American Tragedy”

It was in 1892, at which time I began work as a newspaperman, that I first began to observe a certain type of crime in the United States. It seemed to spring from the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrowing ambition to be somebody financially and socially. In short, the general mental mood of America was directed toward escape from any form of poverty. This ambition did not imply merely the attainment of comfort and the wherewithal to make happy one’s friends, but rather the accumulation of wealth implying power, social superiority, even social domination. It all struck me as anomalous, in a supposedly Christian democracy dedicated to the principle of brotherly love.

Of course, in my school days I had swallowed innocently enough stories of patriots who had devoted their lives unselfishly to the upbringing, development, and defense of their native land. They had fought and died for liberty as against privilege, and the right of every man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But a few years later, on seeking to place myself economically, I found that there were some contradictions not to be overlooked. Most men, as I found, were neither patriots nor advocates of liberty for others, nor were they even fair-minded. Life was a struggle for existence, and a cruel struggle. To be sure, there was operating a so-called social system which sought by law at least to enforce some measure of honesty and fairness. But as to the working of the same, how different! In every town and city with which I came in contact, the well-to-do dominated the less well-to-do, and to the general disad-vantage of the latter. The rich controlled whatever industries there were and fixed all too often the most exacting and not infrequently slave-like hour and wage terms. Altogether, pride and show, and even waste were flaunted in a new and still fairly virgin land— in the face of poverty and want, and not poverty and want on the part of those who would not work, but the poverty and want of those who were all too eager to work, and almost on any terms.

In other words, I was witnessing the upbuilding of the great American fortunes. And once these fortunes and the families which controlled them were established, there began to develop our “leisure class,” the Four Hundred of New York and the slave aristocracy of the South, plus their imitators in the remainder of the states. And this class, as I studied it, presented the very interesting thought that all of its heirs and assigns were not so much interested in work or mental or national development in any form as they were in leisure and show—the fan-fare and parade of wealth without any consideration for the workers from whom it was taken or the country as a whole. I saw also that the maintaining of those privileges was likewise the principle business of those who were not heirs to anything—the young and ambitious in nearly all walks of life. In fact, between 1875 and 1900, it became an outstanding American madness which led first to the great war of 1914—1918 and culminated finally in the financial debacle of 1929.

Indeed, throughout this period, as 1 found, it was the rare American heart that was set, for instance, on being a great scientist, discoverer, religionist, philosopher, or benefactor to mankind in any form. True enough, a man might start out to be a doctor, a lawyer, a merchant, an inventor, perhaps even a scientist, but his private obsession, due to the national obsession which I have just described, was that the quick and sure way to do this was to get money. And one of the quickest ways to get money was to marry it, not develop oneself and so have money come honestly. In short, we bred the for-tune hunter de luxe. Fortune-hunting became a disease. Hence my first notice of and interest in the particular crime first mentioned.

In the main, as I can show by the records, it was the murder of a young girl by an ambitious young man. The Albert T. Patrick case in New York presented the picture of a shrewd attorney murdering his rich old client. For this crime Patrick was sentenced to life imprisonment. Another case—guilt not finally proven—related to the millionaire Swope family of Kansas City. A doctor son-in-law was charged with bringing about not only the diseases but the deaths of Swope and several heirs to his fortune. The doctor was acquitted, but the evidence presented an amazing picture of the mental mood of many Americans in regard to money.

A third variation was that of the young ambitious lover of some poorer girl, who in the earlier state of his affairs had been attractive enough to satisfy him both in the matter of her love and social station. But nearly always with the passing of time and the growth of experience on the part of the youth, a more attractive girl with money or position appeared and he quickly discovered that he could no longer care for his first love. What produced this particular type of crime about which I am talking was that it was not always possible to drop the first girl. What usually stood in the way was pregnancy, plus the genuine affection of the girl herself for her love, plus also her determination to hold him. This the conventionally-minded usually acclaimed as reasonable and right (this determination, I mean), while the more sophisticated looked upon it as a futile and stupid reason for holding that which is not to be held, or if so held, is worthless.

Nevertheless, these murders, based upon these facts and these conditions, proved very common in my lifetime and my personal experience as a journalist. One of the most tragic of them I contacted in 1894, when I first arrived in New York. It was the really tragic case of Carlyle Harris, a young medical student, an interne in one of the leading New York hospitals, who seduced a young girl poorer and less distinguished than he was, or at least hoped to be. No sooner had he done this than the devil, or some anachronistic element in the very essence of life, presented Carlyle with an attractive girl of a very much higher station than his own, one who possessed not only beauty but wealth. The way Carlyle finally sought to rid himself of the other girl was to supply her with a dozen powders, four of which were poisoned, and so intended to bring about her death. One of them did: Result: discovery, trial, execution. In this case I chanced by reason of a strange contact to know his mother, a rather fine and loving, if overly-determined and ruling one. She was a widow and had little money. But she was utterly devoted to her son’s welfare and bent on bringing about his success, socially as well as professionally. She wanted him to get up in the world, be famous, marry money. She told me so. In part I blame her for her urgency and insistence on what was the proper type of life for him. In part I blame America and its craze for social and money success.

After that, this particular type of tragedy, as it seemed to me, became more and more common. As a matter of fact, between 1895 and this present year there has scarcely been a year in which some part of the country has not been presented with crime of this type. For instance, there was one in San Francisco in 1899. In 1900 came a Charleston, South Carolina, case, wherein a girl was shot by her lover because he wanted to better his social condition by marrying a Charleston society girl.

In the summer of 1905, at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks, the murder which I wrote about twenty years later and which I named An American Tragedy was committed. It concerned one Chester Gillette, a young collar worker at Cortland, New York, and Grace (better known as Billy) Brown, who came from a farm near Otselic, New York, but worked in the same fac-tory with Gillette at Cortland. The first America heard of it was when the press in a small dispatch from Old Forge, a small town not far from Big Moose Lake, announced that a boy and girl who had come to Big Moose to spend a holiday had gone out in a boat and both been drowned. An upturned boat, plus a floating straw hat, was found in a remote part of the lake. The lake was dragged and one body was discovered and identified as that of Billy Brown. And then came news of the boy who had been seen with her. He was located as the guest of a smart camping party on one of the adjacent lakes and was none other than Chester Gillette, the nephew of a collar factory owner in Cortland. He was identified as the boy who had been with Billy Brown at the lake. Later, still, because of a bundle of letters written by the girl and found in his room at Cortland, their love affair was disclosed, also the fact that she was pregnant, and was begging him to marry her. In one letter, the last, she even threatened that unless he came to her at once at Otselic’ (where, because of her condition, she had retired), and would take her away and marry her, she would return to Cortland and expose him “before all his fine friends.” He was indicted and charged with murder. The upturned boat, his straw hat (a duplicate of the one he usually wore), a wound over the girl’s forehead—which he said was caused by the overturning boat but which the District Attorney charged was made either by an oar or broken tennis racket found hidden under a log in the woods nearby and which was proved to have been purchased by Gillette—were sufficient to convince a country jury that he had committed the crime. And he was electrocuted at Auburn Penitentiary, a final confession, it is said, having preceded his death.

After that, and cited here in order to show my reason for naming this crime An American Tragedy, came others of the same nature. I will list them as briefly as possible.

In 1907 or 1908 the Roland Molyneux case of New York City. In 1909 or 1910 the Orpet case, in Chicago. In 1914 or 1915 the Avis Linnell-Richardson case of Hyannis, Massachusetts. In this case the facts equally war-ranted the title: An American Tragedy. For here was a young preacher, Richardson, with a small church in Hyannis. He had come up from nothing, learned little or nothing, accumulated no money, and was struggling along on a small salary. Of course, he was good looking, socially agreeable, a fair orator, and so on. From all I could gather at the time, Avis was a charming and emotionally interesting and attractive girl, but of circumstance and parentage as unnoticed as Richardson’s. Alas, love, a period of happiness, seduction with a promise of marriage, and then Mephistopheles, with nothing more and nothing less in his hand than a call to one of the richest and most socially distinguished congregations in Boston. There followed his installation as pastor, and soon after that one of the wealthy beauties of his new congregation fixed her eye on him and decided that he was the one for her. Yet in the background was Avis and her approaching motherhood. And his promise of marriage. And so, since his new love moved him to visions of social grandeur far beyond his previous dreams, he sought to cast off Avis. Yet she in love and agonized, insisted that he help her rid herself of the child or marry her. Once more then, poisoned powders and death. And at last Richardson dragged from his grand pulpit to a prison cell. And then trial, and death in an electric chair because he had killed Avis.

But then on July 31^st of this year, at Harvey’s Lake near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, occurred what was immediately announced by the newspapers as an exact duplicate of An American Tragedy. It was a murder said to have been committed by Robert Allen Edwards, a resident of Edwardsville, a part of Wilkes-Barre. His victim was Freda McKechnie, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. George McKechnie of Edwardsville. And by various newspapers I was shortly asked to say whether or not this was a duplicate of my story and whether in my opinion the novel had brought about the murder. My answer was that without much more evidence than was available at that time I could not say, but that because of many related cases which had occurred before this one, I doubted very much that the crime was inspired by the book. It seemed to me rather one inspired by conditions in America which produce, or at least have produced up to this time, exactly that sort of crime.

My reason for saying this was that by the time I had reached the place where I wanted to and did write An American Tragedy—that is, 1924-25—I had concluded that the facts outlined in the introduction to this article were the real cause. Furthermore, in my examination of such data as I could find in 1924 relating to the Chester Gillette-Billy Brown case, I had become convinced that there was an entire misunderstanding, or perhaps I had better say non-apprehension, of the conditions or circumstances surrounding the victims of that murder before the murder was committed. From these circumstances, which I drew not only from the testimony introduced at the trial but from newspaper investigations and information which preceded and accompanied the trial, I concluded that the murder was not one which could either wisely or justly be presented to an ordinary conventional, partly religious, and morally controlled American jury and be intelligently passed upon. Rather I concluded that there were too many elements of a social and economic, as well as moral and religious, character to permit a jury (themselves the representatives, one might even say the victims, of these same financial conditions and social taboos) to judge fairly the guilt or innocence of the alleged murderer.

In the case of Chester Gillette, I soon decided, after examining his background, that he was in the first place not sufficiently developed men-tally to be the deliberate author of a truly anti-social murder. He was too young, too inexperienced in the ways of life, to calculate a crime which would be sufficiently anti-social to warrant his destruction. His parents had been exceedingly poor, victims really of their inability to devise even a moderate physical subsistence for themselves and their children. They were street preachers, running small and unprofitable missions. In short, social pariahs. They had moved about a great deal, forming no connections of any worth, and being ambitious, Chester Gillette had obviously been over-impressed by what he considered the superior state of others. Further-more, and to complicate his illusions in connection with all this, there were rumors of an uncle, the brother of his father, who was a well-to-do collar manufacturer in Cortland, New York. Chester Gillette seems to have built up the notion that if in some fashion he could connect himself with the superior life of this uncle, he would naturally pass from a lower to a higher social and financial state. And that, as you see, ties up with the general social and financial attitude of Americans—their dreams of grandeur, all based on financial advancement.

Furthermore, as I said to myself, this was really not an anti-social dream as Americans should see it, but rather a pro-social dream. He was really doing the kind of thing which Americans should and would have said was the wise and moral thing for him to do had he not committed a murder. His would not ordinarily be called the instinct of a criminal; rather, it would be deemed the instinct of a worthy and respected temperament.

However, when Chester reached Cortland, he found that his better state was not to be as easily come by as he had dreamed. In other words, he was placed in the anomalous position of being at once the nephew of a man who was socially and financially secure and at the same time a mere eight-or-ten-dollar-a week collar worker. His future seemingly depended on his personal skill. And this he did not possess, for he was by no means gifted technically. He was romantic and to a degree vain, but not constructively acquisitive.

Next, his position as a collar worker forced upon him the social opportunities which conditioned the workers themselves. For companionship he had to look to his fellow-workers and among them he found Billy Brown, a girl of beautiful and sympathetic temperament who was drawn to him by his looks and the fact that he was related to the family which owned the factory in which they both worked.

At the trial it was not denied by him that he loved her at first. The general picture seemed to indicate that he was happy enough in this companion-ship, until, by reason of his reputation as the nephew of a rich man, he came to be looked upon finally as worthy of the attention of girls of a higher station than Billy Brown. And finally, one of these girls paid him considerable attention and quickly inflamed him, not only with love for her but with the thought that by marrying her he would be stepping up into the social world represented by his uncle, and which he considered ideal. This fact, which I found to be the outstanding one in the prosecution’s effort to establish and prove motive for murder, was the one which proved to me that it was not a desire for murder that was prompted by that dream of his but rather the reverse. For if it proved anything, it proved that he wished to reach a social state in which no such evil thing as murder could possibly be contemplated. In short, as I said to myself at the time, it cannot be true that this boy is unsocial in his mood or tendencies. It is just the reverse. He is pro-social.

The fact that he aspired to a better social state with this other girl proved, if anything, that he had no desire to go against the organized standards of the society of his day. In fact, having made what he considered a social mistake in connecting himself with Billy Brown, his hope and desire was to rectify that by a conventional marriage with this other girl. And that at first by no means indicated or suggested as existing in his mind and thought, let alone determination, that he would or should be required to murder anybody in order to achieve it. He merely wanted to divest himself of the poorer relationship in order to achieve the richer one. And you may depend upon it that if he had had money and more experience in the ways of immorality, he would have known ways and means of indulging himself in the relationship with Billy Brown without bringing upon himself the morally compulsive relation of prospective fatherhood.

But he did not have the money. And the lack of it, however inimical to his dreams of a happy marriage with the richer girl, was no crime in itself. What crime there was entered at the point when, finding himself frustrated on the one hand by his desire to marry the richer girl and on the other hand by his inability to extricate Billy Brown from her predicament, he thought of murder. But even here it was impossible for me to say that at any time murder was his desire. What he really wanted even to the very end was escape. And up to the moment that he upset the boat and struck her with a tennis racket (if he did), his desire was not to go against the ideals of society, but to go with them. Frustration was not anything which he criminally planned. It came upon him without any desire on his part, and decidedly against every wish of his being. When he found that he could not free himself from this girl, then there entered the thought of escape: murder.

But there again, I was compelled to ask myself: “Was it murder for murder’s sake?” Anyone with a grain of sense knows that it was not. He did not wish to murder. He sought every lane of escape before murder came as the last sad resource. For he was confronted by a state to which he was socially and emotionally fearfully opposed, one which was sufficient, probably, to have affected his powers of reason. It could, and probably did, absolutely befuddle and finally emotionally derange a youth who because of his romantic dreams, and more, because when subject to them he was also subject to those dreadful economic, social, moral and conventional pressures about him, was finally driven romantically mad and brought to the point of committing a crime that was so terrible to the world.

But why so widely heralded at the time? Why the sorrow, sympathy, pain really, to the hearts of millions not only for Billy Brown but for him? Why? I will tell you. Because the emotions, so much more quickly than the far more commonplace scales of the brain, register the essential truth. That is why.

Not Chester Gillette, I said to myself at the time, planned this crime, but circumstances over which he had no control—circumstances and laws and rules and conventions which to his immature and more or less futile mind were so terrible, so oppressive, that they were destructive to his reasoning powers. No more and no less. He was not seeking murder. By no means. To the very last analysis, even when he struck the blow, he was seeking to escape—striking to escape. If at the moment when he stood in the boat and was ready to strike Billy Brown with the tennis racket, a voice had called: “Stop! You don’t have to do that in order to escape. Take the girl to a doctor. Have an operation performed. Give her this money and tell her how deeply you desire to be released and why, and she will release you”—there is no question in my mind, and none in yours, that he would have dropped the racket and gladly gone about the business of giving this girl her life and freedom. Is there any sane person on the face of the earth who would honestly deny the validity of this? But life—circumstances—would not have it so.

And yet in spite of these conditions and circumstances which were plainly to be seen by anyone who could see, the boy was fearfully denounced, tortured with public obloquy and even hatred. It was suggested that he be lynched, and once the case was given to the jury he was quickly convicted of murder and sentenced to death. And though the case was carried to the Court of Appeals and afterwards to Governor (later Chief Justice) Hughes; neither the court nor the governor could trace out these truer rea-sons for the deed which he committed. He must die. . . .¹⁴

NOTES

1. Theodore Dreiser, A History of Myself: Dawn (New York: Liveright, 1931), pp. 172-174.

2. Ibid., pp. 159-160, 297-298.

3. Dreiser, “Reflections,” Ev’ry Month, 3 (October 1896): 6-7.

4. Dreiser, Ev’ry Month, 4 (May 1897): 21.

5. Dreiser, “The Man on the Sidewalk,” Bohemian, 17 (October 1909): 422-423.

6. Dreiser, “True Art Speaks Plainly,” Booklover’s Magazine, 1 (February 1903): 129.

7. Otis Notman, “Talks with Four Novelists,” New York Times Saturday Review of Books, 15 June 1907, p. 393.

8. Dreiser to Fremont Older, 27 November 1923, in Letters of Theodore Dreiser, edited by Robert H. Elias (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), II: 417-420.

9. Aimer C. Sanborn, “Now Comes Author Theodore Dreiser Who Tells of 100,000 Jennie Gerhardts,” Cleveland Leader, 12 November 1911, Cosmopolitan sec., p. 5.

10. Dreiser, “A Lesson from the Aquarium,” Tom Watson’s Magazine, 3 (January 1906): 306-308.

11. Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health (1875; reprint, Boston: First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1971), p. 468.

12. Dreiser, “A Confession of Faith,” in Theodore Dreiser: A Selection of Uncollected Prose, edited by Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), pp. 181-183.

13. “Theodore Dreiser Now Turns to High Finance,” New York Sun, 19 October 1912, part 2, p. 3.

14. Dreiser, “I Find the Real American Tragedy,” Mystery Magazine, 11 (February 1935): 88-90.