• WORKS
• CRITICAL SUMMARY*
• ART IMITATING LIFE
• DREISER’S REPUTATION AND CURRENT STATUS
• PRODUCTIONS AND ADAPTATIONS OF DREISER’S WORKS
• NOTES

WORKS

Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900; revised, edited by John C. Berkey and others. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. The youthful Carrie Meeber comes to Chicago from a small Wisconsin town in quest of a better life. She is miserable working in a shoe factory and thus succumbs readily to the advances of Charles Drouet, a salesman, and begins living with him. Through Drouet, Carrie meets G. W. Hurstwood, the imposing manager of a Chicago saloon, who, though married, takes a strong interest in her. Carrie triumphs in an amateur theatrical but is greatly disturbed when she discovers that Hurstwood is married. Dissatisfied in his marriage and wanting Carrie desperately, Hurstwood steals a large sum of money from his firm’s safe and persuades Carrie to run away with him to New York. In New York the displaced Hurstwood begins a slow but inexorable decline in will and fortunes, and finally, as a Bowery bum, commits suicide. Carrie, on the other hand, leaves Hurstwood during his descent and becomes a successful Broadway actress, though at the close of the novel she has not attained the happiness she earlier associated with success.

Jennie Gerhardt. New York: Harper, 1911; revised, edited by James L. W. West III. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Jennie is a member of a large and impoverished German immigrant family living in Columbus, Ohio, where she and her mother are employed as cleaners in a local hotel. George Brander, a middle-aged bachelor and U.S. senator who lives in the hotel, is deeply attracted by Jennie’s youth and purity and seeks to aid her and her family. Jennie becomes pregnant by Brander, who dies suddenly of a heart attack before he can fulfill his intention of marrying her. Jennie’s father, a devout Lutheran, demands that she leave home, and she moves to Cleveland with her child, Vesta, where she finds employment as a maid with a well-to-do family. There she meets Lester Kane, from a wealthy and prominent Cincinnati family. Lester and Jennie are deeply drawn to each other and are

soon living together, initially in Cleveland and then in Chicago, where they pass several happy years in a household that includes Vesta and Jennie’s widowed father, who is now reconciled with his daughter. Lester has never married Jennie, however, and when his family’s discovery of their relationship threatens his position in the family firm, he separates from her. Many years later, as Lester lies dying, he tells Jennie that he deeply regrets his action.

The Financier. New York: Harper, 1912; revised, New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927. Frank Algernon Cowperwood exhibits from childhood the shrewdness and strength of will that allows him to succeed in the bustling Philadelphia commercial world. By the close of the Civil War, though only in his late twenties, he is a successful banker and broker and a family man. His confidence in his own strength, his desire to take all from life that it offers, and his contempt for moralism of any kind, however, lead Cowperwood to engage in various suspect financial transactions and to begin an affair with Aileen Butler, the young daughter of one of his political allies, the wealthy Irish American contractor Edward Butler. The panic caused by the Chicago Fire of 1871 exposes Cowperwood’s illegal use of city money deposited in his firm, and an informant reveals to Butler his relationship with Aileen. Deserted by everyone except Aileen, Cowperwood is tried for fraud and serves more than a year in prison. On his release, he regains his fortune by shrewd dealings during the panic of 1873; he divorces his wife and marries Aileen. He and Aileen begin a new life in Chicago.

A Traveler at Forty. New York: Century, 1913. Dreiser’s account of his first trip to Europe, which he began in November 1911 and concluded in April 1912.

The Titan. New York: John Lane, 1914. In the expansive conditions of post-Civil War Chicago, Cowperwood adapts quickly to the corrupt financial and political machinations necessary for success and becomes a major player in the acquisition of street railway systems, which he milks for financial gain. Increasingly aware of Aileen’s social and artistic limitations (he now is an avid collector of great art), he also engages in a series of affairs. By the late 1890s, Cowperwood is completely enamored of Berenice Fleming, an ethereal young woman. At the height of his powers and self-confidence—“I satisfy myself” is his personal code—he suffers a temporary setback when his plan for a Chicago streetcar monopoly is defeated.

The “Genius.” New York: John Lane, 1915. Although Eugene Witla is a painter rather than a writer, many of the events of the novel closely resemble those of Dreiser’s own life. Midwestern born, Witla attends a Chicago art school and discovers that his love for beauty is inextricably connected to his desire for young women. He moves to New York and commits himself to the realistic portrayal of the city but also, after a long engagement, marries the convention-bound Angela Blue. His initial success in the New York art world is followed by a nervous breakdown; recovery is aided by a stint working on a New York railroad and a passionate love affair. After several years of editing a major magazine and of bitter arguments with Angela, Witla falls in love with the youthful Suzanne Dale, whose mother strongly opposes the relationship. Witla is fired, Angela dies in childbirth, and Suzanne is taken away to Europe by her mother, but Witla returns to his art strengthened by the growth of a philosophical perspective on the wonders and vagaries of existence.

A Hoosier Holiday. New York: John Lane, 1916. Dreiser’s account of an automobile trip to his home state of Indiana, undertaken in the summer of 1915 with his friend the illustrator Franklin Booth.

Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural. New York: John Lane, 1916. A collection of Dreiser’s plays, comprising The Girl in the Coffin, The Blue Sphere, Laughing Gas, In the Dark, The Spring Recital, The Light in the Window, and “Old Ragpicker.” The collection was revised and enlarged in 1930 as Plays, Natural and Supernatural (London: Constable); the additional plays were Phantasmagoria, The Court of Progress, The Dream, The Anaesthetic Revelation, and The Hand of the Potter.

Free and Other Stories. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1918. Dreiser’s first short-story collection, comprising “Free,” “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers,” “Nigger Jeff,” “The Lost Phoebe,” “The Second Choice,” “A Story of Stories,” “Old Rogaum and His Theresa,” “Will You Walk into My Parlor?” “Married,” “The Cruise of the ‘Idlewild,’” and “When the Old Century Was New.”

Twelve Men. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919; revised, edited by Robert Coltrane. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. A collection of character sketches, comprising “Peter,” “A Doer of the Word,” “My Brother Paul” (about Dreiser’s brother Paul Dresser), “The Country Doctor,” “Culhane, the Solid Man,” “A True Patriarch,” “De Maupassant, Jr.,” “The Village Feudists,” “Vanity, Vanity,” “The Mighty Rourke,” “A Mayor and His People,” and “W.L.S.”

The Hand of the Potter. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919; revised, 1927. One of Dreiser’s most controversial works, a tragic drama about a child molester.

Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920. An essay collection comprising “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” “Change,” “Some Aspects of Our National Character,” “The Dream,” “The American Financier,” “The Toil of the Laborer,” “Personality,” “A Counsel to Perfection,” “Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse,” “Secrecy—Its Value,” “Ideals, Morals, and the Daily Newspaper,” “Equation Inevitable,” “Phantasmagoria,” “Ashtoreth,” “The Reformer,” “Marriage and Divorce,” “More Democracy or Less? An Inquiry,” “The Essential Tragedy of Life,” “Life, Art and America,” and “The Court of Progress.”

A Book About Myself. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1921; republished as A History of Myself: Newspaper Days. New York: Liveright, 1931; revised as Newspaper Days, edited by T. D. Nostwich. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. The second volume of Dreiser’s autobiography, completed in 1917, which covers his career as a reporter for various newspapers. (The first volume, A History of Myself: Dawn, was finished in 1914 but was not published until 1931.)

The Color of a Great City. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923. A collection of thirty-nine sketches of city life.

An American Tragedy, 2 volumes. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. In his youth Clyde Griffiths begins to rebel against the poverty and strict moralism of his parents, who eke out a meager existence as Kansas City street evangelists. His estrangement is solidified by his work as a bellhop at an opulent hotel, which reveals to him the life of pleasure available through wealth. After his complicity in an accident involving a stolen automobile, Clyde flees to Chicago, where he encounters his uncle, Samuel Griffiths, the prosperous owner of a shirt factory in Lycurgus (in upstate New York), who offers him employment in the factory. There he establishes a secret relationship with Roberta Alden, a fellow worker who, like Clyde, comes from an impoverished background. The relationship is soon complicated both by Roberta’s pregnancy and the interest shown in Clyde by Sandra Finchley, the socially prominent daughter of a local factory owner. Roberta insists that Clyde marry her. Clyde, in his anguish at the fear of losing Sandra, plans a trip to the North Woods where he will kill Roberta. On a remote North Woods lake, although Clyde loses heart at the last moment, Roberta nevertheless drowns when their boat capsizes. Clyde is quickly apprehended and after a trial is sentenced to death and electrocuted.

Moods: Cadenced and Declaimed. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926; revised and enlarged, 1928; revised as Moods: Philosophical and Emotional (Cadenced and Declaimed). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1935. The first edition is a collection of 177 of Dreiser’s poems. The 1928 edition includes all of the poems in the first edition and twenty-nine additional poems. For the 1935 edition Dreiser omitted thirty-seven poems and added seventy-seven new ones.

Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927. A collection comprising “Sanctuary,” “The Hand,” “Chains,” “St. Columbus and the River,” “Convention,” “Khat,” “Typhoon,” “The Old Neighborhood,” “Phantom Gold,” “Marriage for One,” “Fulfillment,” “Victory,” “The Shadow,” “The ‘Mercy of God,’” and “The Prince Who Was a Thief.”

Dreiser Looks at Russia. New York: Live-right, 1928. Dreiser’s account of his journey to the Soviet Union in late 1927, taken from a series of syndicated newspaper articles he wrote about his trip.

A Gallery of Women, 2 volumes. New York: Liveright, 1929. A collection of fifteen semifictionalized biographical sketches of women.

A History of Myself: Dawn. New York: Liveright, 1931. The first volume of Dreiser’s autobiography, covering roughly the first twenty years of his life, up to the period when he was working at various jobs in Chicago prior to becoming a newspaper reporter.

Tragic America. New York: Liveright, 1931. A largely unsuccessful critique of American society, much of it prepared by editorial assistants.

America Is Worth Saving. New York: Modern Age, 1941. An attack on America’s support of England in World War II, mostly ghost-written and following the Communist Party line.

The Bulwark. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 1946. It is late in the nineteenth century and Solon Barnes, a devout Quaker youth, marries his childhood sweetheart, Benecia Wallin, and through Benecia’s wealthy Quaker father begins a career in a Philadelphia bank. Solon and Benecia have five children, and Solon also prospers at the bank. As the children mature, however, each begins in his or her own way to rebel against the strict regimen of Quaker belief and life, causing Solon much pain. In addition, he is deeply troubled by the shady speculative actions of several of the bank’s directors. Solon is shattered when Stewart, the youngest of his sons, commits suicide in prison after having sex at a party with a girl who is later found dead. Solon resigns from the bank and begins failing in health and spirit, saved only shortly before his death by his abiding Quaker faith and his belief in the wonder and beauty of nature.

The Stoic. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947. Cowperwood and Berenice become lovers, and with renewed vigor Cowperwood undertakes to build a London underground railway system. Although he and Aileen continue their marriage, he frequently lives with Berenice both in New York and London. Cowperwood becomes seriously ill and dies before the completion of his vast project, and his fortune is dissipated by lawsuits. Berenice becomes absorbed in Hindu philosophy, travels to India to study, and returns to America with plans to establish in New York a hospital for slum children, where she will become a nurse.

Notes on Life, edited by Marguerite Tjader and John J. McAleer. University: University of Alabama Press, 1974. Posthumously published edition of portions of the philosophical study on which Dreiser worked from the mid 1930s to 1944.

Theodore Dreiser: A Selection of Uncollected Prose, edited by Donald Pizer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977.

American Diaries, 1902-1926, edited by Thomas P. Riggio and others. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

An Amateur Laborer, edited by Richard Dowell and others. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Dreiser’s memoir, completed in 1904, of his experiences working as a helper and clerk for the New York Central Railroad in the latter half of 1903, a job he took as part of his recuperation from a period of depression that began in 1901.

Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser: Life and Art in the American 1890s, 2 volumes, edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985, 1987.

Theodore Dreiser: Journalism, volume 1, Newspaper Writings, 1892-1895, edited by T. D. Nostwich. Philadelphia: University of Penn-sylvania Press, 1988.

Theodore Dreiser’s “Heard in the Corridors” Articles and Related Writings, edited by Nostwich. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988. A collection of Dreiser’s “Heard in the Corridors” columns, written from November 1892 to May 1893 for The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and similar articles written earlier for the Chicago Globe and later for the Pittsburgh Dispatch.

Theodore Dreiser’s Ev’ry Month, edited by Nancy Warner Barrineau. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Dreiser’s contributions to Ev’ry Month from 1895 to 1897.

Dreiser’s Russian Diary, edited by Thomas P. Riggio and James L. W. West III. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

CRITICAL SUMMARY^*

Because discussion of Dreiser and his fiction has often served as a vehicle for cultural and literary polemics, criticism of his writing frequently reveals as much about its moment as about its ostensible subject. From the publication of Sister Carrie to the present, an opportunity to examine Dreiser also has meant an opportunity to press the claims of a particular view of American life and a specific concept about the nature of fiction.

During Dreiser’s early career, such defenders of his work as Sherwood Anderson and H. L. Mencken were not merely engaged in the praise of novels that had moved them. They were also seeking to cast Dreiser in the symbolic role of the trailblazer whose willingness to challenge the conventional beliefs and genteel codes of American life had opened a way for others. “The feet of Dreiser,” Anderson wrote, are “making a path for us.” If Dreiser’s feet were “heavy” and “brutal,”¹ as Anderson went on to note, it was because he had mountains of resistance to scale. If Dreiser’s work appeared to lack beauty, it was because the concept of beauty had degenerated into a belief in mere surface grace and polish. And if his ideas were often tedious or obscure, it was because he was fumbling honestly for truths that others had long refused to acknowledge. In short, to his supporters Dreiser’s defects were the virtues of a pathfinder and iconoclast. To those who opposed Dreiser—and these included the great majority of journalistic reviewers and most academic critics—the issue was the question of “brutality,” or, more specifically, the amorality and sexuality of the first two volumes of The Cowperwood Trilogy and. The “Genius.” To Stuart Sherman in 1915, Dreiser’s fiction constituted not the pure voice of truth but rather the howl of an atavistic animalism. Men may often be selfish and brutal, Sherman and others agreed, but they also held that civilization represented the effort to control these remnants of our animal past through reason and will, and that literature should depict the desirability and possibility of achieving this goal. (It is of interest to note that this attack on Dreiser’s “barbarism” reached its shrillest level during World War I, when critics such as Sherman frequently alluded to Dreiser’s German ancestry.)

By the mid 1930s, with the critical acceptance of writers far more sensationally explicit than Dreiser in their material and themes, it appeared that his struggle for recognition had been won. But instead he became during this and the following decade the negative focus of two additional critical movements with widespread cultural significance. Although critics such as Alfred Kazin and F. O. Matthiessen continued to praise him for having achieved a powerful blend of social realism and pathos, it became more common to attack Dreiser, as did Lionel Trilling in his well-known essay “Reality in America,” both for his idea of reality and for his mode of depicting it.

Trilling’s essay indirectly expresses a widely shared revulsion by formerly radical critics of the 1930s toward writers whose work and thought had close ties to the Communist Party and its policies during the decade. Dreiser was perhaps the principal example of a major American literary figure of this kind. During the 1930s and early 1940s he could be counted upon to endorse the party’s position in almost every cause and issue, including its support of the Soviet Union during the vastly unpopular Soviet-Finnish War. When Dreiser died not only an unrepentant camp follower but also an actual party member (in a symbolic act, he joined the party in 1945, the year of his death), he became a prime target for those critics who had themselves been party sympathizers during the early 1930s but who had rejected its leadership and ideology as the decade progressed. Since Dreiser’s intellect was suspect in his continued support of communism, what better way to demonstrate his intellectual vacuity than to point out the inadequacy of his ideas in his fiction?

Trilling’s essay also reflects the adverse impact upon Dreiser’s reputation during this period of the New Criticism, which stressed the close reading of texts without regard to information about the author’s life or the culture in which he wrote. To many academic critics bred upon the great attention to form and structure in the close reading of Henry James’s novels and post-Jamesian fictional experimentation, Dreiser’s awkwardness and massiveness seemed the antithesis of the art of fiction. Thus, with Dreiser in disfavor as both thinker and artist—to say nothing of the confusion created by the mystic element in his two posthumous novels—it was no wonder that during the 1940s and 1950s, as Irving Howe recalls, his work was “a symbol of everything a superior intelligence was supposed to avoid.”²

Although the Trilling-Matthiessen dispute of the early 1950s over Dreiser’s “power” (is it a left-wing myth, or does it in truth reside in his fiction?) still occasionally surfaces, much of the writing about Dreiser in the following three decades shifted from the use of him as a cultural symbol to a close examination of his career and work. Robert Elias’s and Thomas P. Riggio’s editions of Dreiser’s letters, as well as biographies by Elias, W. A. Swanberg, and Richard Lingeman, provided a solid base of facts about Dreiser’s life. In addition, since the early 1960s the availability of Dreiser’s literary estate at the University of Pennsylvania has provided an important source for the detailed study of the genesis of his work. Several scholars—for example, Ellen Moers, Richard Lehan, Philip Gerber, and Donald Pizer—have written full-length studies of Dreiser that are based in large part upon material in the Dreiser Collection. The ongoing Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition, a project devoted to the preparation and publication of scholarly editions of Dreiser’s works, owes much to the Collection.

By the mid 1960s, some of the older strains in Dreiser criticism had died out. No longer was it necessary to defend or attack his subjects or ideas because of their challenge to contemporary conventions. But other issues of long-standing controversy in the discussion of Dreiser’s work continued to attract much attention, which suggests that they have become permanent centers of interest in Dreiser criticism. One of these is Dreiser’s naturalism—or, to put it another way, what is naturalism and how is Dreiser a naturalist? The question appears simple, and many early critics treated it as such. Naturalism was a Darwinian-based pessimistic determinism in theme and a crude massiveness in technique, and Dreiser was a prime example of both. But most critics who have written since Eliseo Vivas’s seminal 1938 essay, “Dreiser, An Inconsistent Naturalist,” have recognized that many different strains make up Dreiser’s distinctive fictional voice, and that some of these strains—his mysticism and transcendentalism, or his prophetic tone—are antithetical to the amoral objectivity of a conventionally conceived naturalist. Although such recent critics as Charles Walcutt, Donald Pizer, June Howard, John Conder, and Lee Clark Mitchell still engage the problems of defining American naturalism and explaining Dreiser as the principal American naturalist, they now incline toward an acceptance of the complexities and ambivalence of both the movement and Dreiser.

Dreiser criticism is still often concerned with the related issue of his verbal and fictional ineptness. Even Mencken, the staunchest of Dreiser’s early champions, could not ignore this aspect of Dreiser’s fiction, and it was of course one of the major reasons for the New Critics’ contempt for his work. However, since the late 1960s several critics, most notably Moers, have discovered considerable subtlety and even “finesse” in Dreiser’s prose style, while still others (Julian Markels and Robert Penn Warren, for example) have argued that the novel as a form creates its effect as much through symbolic constructs as through language and that Dreiser’s success with such constructs explains his success as a novelist.

Much Dreiser criticism since the mid 1980s has focused less on the themes and quality of his fiction than on the question of the relationship of his thought and work to the large-scale social and cultural issues of his time involving America’s condition as an urban society and consumerist economy, issues that still preoccupy the nation. Often drawing on the critical strategies of contemporary movements in literary theory and cultural studies and focusing mainly on Sister Carrie, this criticism seeks to identify the significant centers of cultural density in Dreiser’s fiction (the department store or the city, as in studies by Rachel Bowlby and Philip Fisher) and to describe the ways in which his work constitutes an endorsement of the prevailing cultural values and assumptions of his time rather than an attack on them (as in the criticism of Walter Benn Michaels, Amy Kaplan, and Michael Davitt Bell). To these critics, Dreiser is of less interest as a turn-of-the-century social realist or naturalist than as an unconscious participant in the underlying myths and values of the American scene then and now.

^* Works by critics named in this summary are included in the Bibliography.

ART IMITATING LIFE

As is not uncommon for a writer of fiction, Dreiser’s earliest novels (Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, and The “Genius”) drew fully and openly on his and his family’s experience. His later novels, while still exploring themes directly related to his deepest personal concerns, derive their casts and plots either from documentary sources (The Cowperwood Trilogy and An American Tragedy) or from a narrative told to him by a friend (The Bulwark).

It should also be noted, however, that the works by Dreiser that represent his most immediate refraction of his own experience into art are his autobiographies. He wrote five such volumes: Dawn, Newspaper Days, A Traveler at Forty, A Hoosier Holiday, and An Amateur Laborer. The first two volumes are rich and exceedingly frank accounts of Dreiser’s early life from his first memories of his Indiana boyhood to the close of his career as a newspaperman in New York in 1895. A Traveler at Forty and A Hoosier Holiday are more specialized volumes; the first recounts Dreiser’s initial trip to Europe during the winter of 1911-1912, the second a nostalgic automobile journey to Indiana in 1915. An Amateur Laborer depicts Dreiser’s period as a laborer and clerk in 1903 following his nervous breakdown. Each of these volumes has its own special flavor and quality, but all are written in a Rousseau-like confessional mode in which all the warts of the personality are exposed. This is especially true of Dawn and A Hoosier Holiday, which render with a frequently painful honesty Dreiser’s sense of his own and his family’s inadequacies during his youth. In addition, all the volumes published in his lifetime are, as originally written by Dreiser, far more candid in their rendering of sexual experience than was permissible at the time of their publication. The Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition is engaged in the publication of each of these volumes in new scholarly editions, with the censored passages restored. Newspaper Days, published in 1991, is the first such edition to have appeared, and the others are in process. Finally, Dreiser’s two collections of semifictional biographical sketches—Twelve Men and A Gallery of Women— are also autobiographical works in that Dreiser is frequently present in the sketches both as an actor within and as a commentator on his recollections of figures who deeply influenced him at various phases of his career.

Dreiser was in his teens and living in Indiana when two of his older sisters, Emma and Mame, underwent the various amorous experiences he later translated into the lives of Carrie and Jennie in Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. He learned initially of their youthful misadventures through hushed conversations at home, and then more fully when he lived in Chicago during the late 1880s. In 1899, when encouraged by his close friend Arthur Henry to undertake a novel, he had only to tap into his knowledge of the early lives of Emma and Mame to have his material. As he later recalled, he began Sister Carrie with little in mind except the title, which he wrote at the head of a sheet of paper. But the word “sister”—a relationship that plays an insignificant role in the novel itself but that was deeply evocative to Dreiser of his own relationship to Emma and thus of her life—was sufficient to propel him into the narrative.

Emma had come to Chicago in the early 1880s as a young woman seeking a freer life than she could lead in the small Indiana towns in which she had been raised. Like all the Dreiser children, she was also in rebellion against the strict religious moralism of her father. She soon began living with an architect considerably older than she, but then fell in love with L. A. Hopkins, a Chicago saloon clerk with a wife and family. Apparently with Emma’s assistance, Hopkins stole a large sum of money from his employer, and the couple absconded to New York. (The theft and elopement were a three-day sensation in the Chicago newspapers.) In New York, Hopkins and Emma settled down to a commonplace existence. Although Dreiser draws fully on the outline of this phase of Emma’s life for his account of Carrie in Chicago, he does not render the story with the tawdry sensationalism of the actual events but rather transforms it into something both deeply personal and far ranging. He endows Carrie with an artistic sensibility and a desire for happiness similar to his sense of his own, and he raises the social and personal stature of Hopkins to the level at which Hurstwood can both attract a Carrie and also suffer a tragic fall because of his desire. In addition, the entire New York phase of the novel, in which Carrie rises to fame and Hurstwood descends to a Bowery bum, is “invented” in the sense that it was created independently of the experiences of Emma and Hopkins in the city. The New York section is infused with Dreiser’s projection into the two figures of his own intense desires and fears: the desire to achieve a level of success as an artist resembling Carrie’s at the close of the novel, and the fear, always present at the deepest level of his emotions throughout his life, that he might sink into a poverty resembling Hurstwood’s.

It should be recalled that though Jennie Gerhardt was not published until 1911, Dreiser had conceived the novel in the summer of 1900, not long after the completion of Sister Carrie. The story of another wayward sister, in other words, arose almost inevitably out of the autobiographical matrix of his just completed narrative. Mame had become pregnant in the late 1870s by a Terre Haute lawyer, who had then

deserted her. She gave birth to a stillborn child and then made her way to Chicago, where she found employment in a boardinghouse. There she met Austin Brennan, the son of a prominent Rochester, New York, family, and became his mistress. Although she and Brennan married in the mid 1880s, it was not for another fifteen years that they were accepted by Brennan’s family and were able to settle in Rochester. As he had done with Sister Carrie, Dreiser used the narrative outline offered by his sister’s early life to construct a story quite different from the actual events. He above all wished to develop the theme that had so moved him in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the theme of the essential morality of all natural processes and affections—motherhood and the love between a man and woman and among the members of a family—whatever the destructive stigmas attached to them when they existed outside of accepted social and moral proprieties. To this end, Jennie is characterized as a figure deeply responsive to the natural; her two lovers, Senator Brander and Lester Kane, are made men of considerable dignity and depth. The love between Jennie and Vesta (her daughter by Brander), between herself and Kane, and eventually even between herself and her moralistic father (a figure closely based on John Dreiser) enriches all their lives—all in the context of the tragic vulnerability of these emotions and relationships to conventional social belief.

Although Eugene Witla, the protagonist of The “Genius,” is an artist rather than a writer, and though Dreiser passes quickly over Witla’s early life, the novel is in most other major respects heavily dependent on Dreiser’s own life from 1892, when he became a newspaperman, to 1910, when the scandal surrounding his relationship with Thelma Cudlipp drove him from the editorship of the Delineator into the resumption of his career as a novelist. Here, in the guise of Witla’s life and in full detail, are Dreiser’s years in journalism and the beginning of his career as a novelist, his long-delayed marriage to a deeply sensual but conventionally minded woman, his breakdown and period of recuperation as a manual laborer, his highly successful career as an editor, and, finally, his affair with Thelma and the breakdown of his marriage. Although The “Genius” was not published until 1916, Dreiser began the novel in late 1910, not long after the chaos created by his relationship with Thelma and the loss of his editorship. He began the novel, in other words, at a point in his own life when he felt a strong need to justify to himself and to others his conception of the artist as a figure who requires absolute freedom both in his personal life and in his art if he is to achieve full creativity. Thus, the novel operates, probably to its detriment in this instance, on a far deeper level of autobiography than a mere dependence on the major events of Dreiser’s adult life. Above all, Dreiser’s fulsome account of Witla’s “varietistic” sexual nature (that is, in a term adopted by Dreiser, his need for constantly changing sexual partners) and his equally extended account of Witla’s destructive relationship with his wife, Angela, are forms of self-centered special pleading and thus often drift into bathos and only partly disguised self-pity.

With The Cowperwood Trilogy Dreiser shifted from a dependence on his and his family’s experience to that of public figures and events. The life of Frank Algernon Cowperwood (Dreiser noted later in his career that the name was to be pronounced as though it were spelled Cooperwood), as told in the novels The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic, is based largely on that of the late-nineteenth-century American tycoon Charles T. Yerkes (1837-1905). Dreiser had originally believed that he could depict Yerkes’s life in one volume, to be called The Financier. But Yerkes’s business affairs in Philadelphia, Chicago, and London as a banker and transit magnate were so fully documented, and Dreiser’s personal research in these cities revealed so much about Yerkes’s personal life, that the project grew into a trilogy. He had been attracted to Yerkes initially because both his career and his unusually frank expression of his motives illustrated the amoral ruthlessness of American business life. But as Dreiser explored his subject more fully, he also found that he could use his retelling of Yerkes’s life to express in a new context some of the same personal themes that had preoccupied him in The “Genius.” Like Witla, Yerkes combined a sensitivity to the beauty of life, especially as present in women, with a rejection of any conventional restraints on the means he used to fulfill his desire for beauty. But unlike the usually hapless Witla, whose varietistic efforts often end in exposure and disaster, Cowperwood is as supreme in this area of life as he is in accumulating an immense fortune and great art works. A keen intelligence, a conscienceless ability to exploit the weaknesses of others, and a capacity to seize what he desires have made him all but invincible in his business and love affairs. Put no doubt crudely, and ignoring the philosophical dimension Dreiser wished to give Cowperwood’s temperament and life, if Witla is a reflection of the actual, often fumbling Dreiser, Cowperwood is a projection of the man of powerful will and consummate success that Dreiser wished to be.

As he explained in several autobiographical accounts, Dreiser had long wished to write a novel based on the constant repetition in American life, as fully recounted in the press, of the tragic outcome of the effort by an ill-equipped young man to achieve the American dream of success. The configuration of this effort that especially appealed to Dreiser was that in which the young man is trapped in a relationship with a “Miss Poor,” while an opportunity for swift advancement in wealth and status awaits him in a possible relationship with a “Miss Rich.” Desperate, the young man murders Miss Poor and is apprehended and convicted. In the early 1920s Dreiser turned to a sensationalistic instance of a crime of this kind as the basis for An American Tragedy, the murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in upstate New York in 1906, a crime for which Gillette was executed in 1908. As with his research on Yerkes for The Cowperwood Trilogy, Dreiser relied heavily on newspaper accounts of Gillette’s trial and also visited the Mohawk River Valley towns and Adirondack lakes that were the sites of Gillette’s relationship with Grace Brown.

Although Dreiser found in his sources extended accounts of Gillette’s activities in Cortland, the town in which he and Grace Brown lived, there was little in these reports of Gillette’s early life, before he arrived in Cortland. However, Dreiser wished to dramatize in an introductory section of the novel the conditions of American life that could so powerfully affect an impressionable youth that when later faced with the dilemma Clyde Griffiths faces in the novel, he is moved inexorably toward disaster. For this material, which constitutes all of Book One in the novel, Dreiser turned to his own experience—indeed, initially almost literally, so that the discarded first version of this portion of the novel includes several incidents drawn directly from the autobiographical Dawn. As revised and compressed by Dreiser, this introductory section was largely new in the sense that Clyde’s specific experiences in Kansas City as a boy and youth do not resemble Dreiser’s in Indiana and Chicago. But in his essential nature Clyde does strongly recall the youthful Dreiser depicted in the autobiographies. Both feel confined within the religious moralism of their homes, and both are deeply drawn to the wonder and beauty of the “outside” world, even though they often mistake, in their inexperience, the stale and tawdry for these qualities. For both, the sexual excitement in their response to a young girl constitutes for them the fullest expression of all that is desirable in life. Dreiser of course was not the later Clyde, who murders in order to fulfill his desires, but there is little doubt that the authorial sympathy and understanding that resonates through much of his portrayal of Clyde in travail later in the novel derives from his powerful identification with the earlier Clyde as depicted in Kansas City.

In 1912 Dreiser met Anna Tatum, a young woman of Pennsylvania Quaker background, who told him her father’s story. A man of strong religious convictions, he had attempted to conduct his business and raise his large family guided by his beliefs, but had been defeated in these attempts and had died a broken man. Dreiser was immediately moved by this account, and at various periods for the next thirty years worked on The Bulwark, his fictional retelling of the story. This effort included considerable research into Quaker belief and turn-of-the-century banking practices, two of the large areas of interest in the novel. For Solon Barnes, however, his wife Benecia, and their five children, Dreiser relied once again, as he had for Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, on the deep imprint of his family’s character and history upon his emotions and consciousness. Thus, Solon’s effort to organize his life and that of his family around religious observance recapitulates John Dreiser’s impact on the Dreiser household, though in a far more understanding and sympathetic portrayal of the inevitable conflict between age and youth than had been present in earlier interpretations. Benicia is the all-sacrificing mother in Dreiser’s never-ending homage to his own mother. Each of the children, in their mix of seeking natures and the often disastrous consequences of their quests, represents for a last time Dreiser’s sense of the underlying similarity between himself and his siblings.

DREISER’S REPUTATION AND CURRENT STATUS

Dreiser’s career, from his earliest newspaper work to the completion of The Bulwark and The Stoic just prior to his death, encompasses more than fifty years and thus an enormous amount of writing. To the twenty-three full-length volumes published during his lifetime it is necessary to add his early extensive newspaper and magazine work and a large body of miscellaneous publication over much of his career. Current interest in Dreiser’s writing falls into two categories: that which is of concern to the scholar and that which still engages the general reader.

To the academic scholar anything written by Dreiser is of value, since the scholar’s understanding of the complex tapestry of an author’s life and work derives from an awareness of its many strands, no matter how minor they might seem in isolation. Thus, there has been a major effort since the 1950s to gather in usable form the important evidence for understanding Dreiser’s sensibility provided by his earliest writing—the editions of his previously unpublished newspaper and magazine writing of the 1890s, for example. So, too, the academic community has sought to make available previously unpublished Dreiser documents and to prepare scholarly editions of his novels and other major works. The extent of this continuing engagement with Dreiser is revealed by the almost six hundred critical discussions of his work that appeared during the 1980s; by the existence of the International Theodore Dreiser Society, with its journal, Dreiser Studies; and by the ongoing scholarly collected edition of his works, the Theodore Dreiser Edition of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

The general reading public, which can be said to consist of college students in literature courses and anyone else seeking to gain a sense of America’s literary heritage, is of course more selective in its interest. Of Dreiser’s novels, Sister Carrie is by far his most widely known and read work. It has remained in print since Dreiser had it republished in 1907, and in recent decades its importance both as an early instance of American literary naturalism and as a complex portrait of the changing role of women in American life has made it a favored selection in courses on the American novel. The success of Sister Carrie in the classroom, however, has been to some extent at the expense of the Dreiser novel which is held by many literary and cultural critics to be his masterwork, An American Tragedy. (In a 1998 poll conducted by the Modern Library, An American Tragedy was ranked in the top twenty of the greatest twentieth-century novels in English.) In the current politics of selection of classroom texts, however, this exceedingly long novel is a nonstarter for most instructors, though many students and general readers who have read and been moved by Sister Carrie go on to read An American Tragedy. Mencken, who had a usually well-disguised streak of sentiment, believed that Jennie Gerhardt was Dreiser’s most fully realized novel; the work still has many supporters today and is available in several editions. For those who approach Dreiser from the direction of a strong interest in late-nineteenth-century American social life, The Financier continues to be an important novel, especially in Dreiser’s more readable 1926 compression of the original 1912 version. The remainder of Dreiser’s writing is usually more selectively pursued by the general public. Of his works other than novels, perhaps Twelve Men and A Hoosier Holiday are of greatest interest to the nonacademic reader—the first for its warmly realized biographical sketches, the second for its lively and self-revealing account of a return “home.”

There are several indicators of the continuing permanence of Dreiser as a world figure. Abroad, he continues to be, as he was for much of his career, one of the most widely translated and reprinted of American authors—not only principally in the countries of the former Eastern bloc, as was true earlier, but throughout the world. The fullest and latest bibliography of Dreiser, Theodore Dreiser: A Primary Bibliography and Reference Guide (1991), cites collected editions of his works published in Russia, Japan, and Croatia. Sister Carrie has been translated into twenty languages, and An American Tragedy into twenty-one. In the United States, all of Dreiser’s novels are in print, with Sister Carrie available in more than ten paperback editions. The Library of America, a series representing an ambitious effort to preserve the best in American writing for the public at large by means of reasonably priced editions of major works, has projected a five-volume edition of Dreiser in the series, one of which has already been published, Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men (1987), edited by Richard Lehan.

PRODUCTIONS AND ADAPTATIONS OF DREISER’S WORKS

PRODUCTIONS OF DREISER’S PLAYS

Laughing Gas. Indianapolis, Masonic Temple, 7 December 1916.

The Girl in the Coffin. St. Louis, St. Louis Artist’s Guild, 28 January 1917.

The Old Ragpicker. San Francisco, Colony Ball Room, 30 January 1918.

The Hand of the Potter. New York, Provincetown Playhouse, 5 December 1921.

STAGE ADAPTATIONS

An American Tragedy. New Haven, Connecticut, Shubert Theatre, 5 October 1926. Dramatization by Patrick Kearney. Starring Morgan Farley, Miriam Hopkins, and Katherine Wilson. A critical and popular success.

The Case of Clyde Griffiths. Moylan-Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, Hedgerow Theatre, April 1935. Dramatization by Edwin Piscator and Lina Gold-schmidt based on An American Tragedy.

MOTION PICTURE ADAPTATIONS

An American Tragedy. Paramount, 1931. Screenplay by Josef von Sternberg and Samuel Hoffenstein. Directed by von Sternberg. Starring Philip Holmes, Sylvia Sydney, and Frances Dee. Dreiser quarreled bitterly with Paramount over this adaptation, which he considered a butchering of the novel; his suit to prevent its release failed.

Jennie Gerhardt. Paramount, 1933. Screenplay by Josephine Lovett and Joseph Moncure. Directed by Marius Gering. Starring Sylvia Sydney and Donald Cook.

My Gal Sal. 20th Century-Fox, 1942. Adaptation of the sketch “My Brother Paul” from Twelve Men. Screenplay by Sexton I. Miller, Darrell Ware, and Karl Tunberg. Directed by Irving Cummings. Starring Victor Mature and Rita Hayworth.

The Prince Who Was a Thief. Universal-International, 1951. Based on the story of the same name from Chains. Screenplay by Gerald Adams and Aeneas MacKenzie. Directed by Rudolph Mate. Starring Tony Curtis, Piper Laurie, and Everett Sloane.

A Place in the Sun. Paramount, 1951. Adaptation of An American Tragedy. Screenplay by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown. Directed by George Stevens. Starring Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters, and Elizabeth Taylor. Winner of Academy Awards for best director and best screenplay.

Carrie. Paramount, 1952. Adaptation of Sister Carrie. Screenplay by Ruth and Augustus Goetz. Directed by William Wyler. Starring Jennifer Jones, Lawrence Olivier, and Eddie Albert.

MUSICAL ADAPTATION

Sister Carrie. Malvern, Pennsylvania, The People’s Light & Theatre Company, 1991. Adapted by Louis Lippa. Music and songs by John Lilley.

NOTES

1. Sherwood Anderson, “Dreiser,” in his Horses and Men: Tales, Long and Short, From Our American Life (New York: Huebsch, 1923), p. 12.

2. Irving Howe, “Dreiser: The Springs of Desire,” in his Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), p. 138.