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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "THEODORE DREISER: Novels, Short Stories, Essays & Biographical Works," readers are immersed in the rich tapestry of American realism, marked by Dreiser's unflinching examination of human ambition, morality, and the social context of the early twentieth century. The collection showcases his distinctive literary style, characterized by naturalistic prose and a profound psychological insight that vividly portrays the struggles and triumphs of individuals in a rapidly industrializing society. Dreiser's works reflect his belief in determinism and the impact of environment on human fate, compelling readers to confront the stark realities of life and the often harsh consequences of personal choice. Theodore Dreiser, a pivotal figure in American literature, drew upon his own tumultuous experiences'—ranging from financial hardship to his tumultuous relationships'—to inform his writing. Born in 1871 to a family of German immigrants, Dreiser's worldview was shaped by the struggles of poverty and social inequality, which fueled his drive to explore complex human conditions and societal issues through his narratives. His groundbreaking approach in works like "Sister Carrie" and "An American Tragedy" solidified his status as a formidable voice of his time. This comprehensive anthology is highly recommended for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of American literature's evolution and Dreiser's influential role within it. Scholars, students, and literary enthusiasts will find this collection a vital resource, illuminating the themes of ambition and tragedy that resonate with contemporary readers, enhancing our comprehension of the human condition. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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THEODORE DREISER: Novels, Short Stories, Essays & Biographical Works
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents a broad survey of Theodore Dreiser’s achievement, assembling major novels alongside short fiction, biographical sketches, and essays to illuminate the full range of his literary vision. Rather than a narrow sampling, it offers a coherent panorama of his preoccupations with modern urban life, ambition, and the pressure of social forces on individual destiny. Readers encounter Dreiser in multiple registers—narrative, analytical, and reflective—so that his themes can be understood not only through story but also through observation and argument. The result is an integrated portrait of an author who helped define American naturalism for the twentieth century.
The volume spans several genres. Its novels include Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy, Jennie Gerhardt, The "Genius," The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic. Short fiction is represented by Free and Other Stories and the story The Mighty Burke. Nonfiction appears in two distinct modes: Twelve Men, a set of biographical portraits, and Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub, a collection of essays. Together these forms trace Dreiser’s persistent interests across narrative scale and rhetorical approach, inviting readers to compare how his themes emerge in expansive, layered plots, in compressed short stories, and in nonfiction that fuses reportage, profile, and philosophical inquiry.
Dreiser’s work is frequently associated with American naturalism, a mode attentive to heredity, environment, and the determinative power of social systems. His style, often patient and reportorial, dwells on particulars—streets, offices, parlors, factories—until the pressures of money, work, desire, and status become palpable. He avoids ornament in favor of clarity and accumulation, allowing characters’ choices to emerge from circumstance rather than abstract moral design. Across forms, he examines mobility and its costs, the seductions of metropolitan life, and the tension between aspiration and constraint. These hallmarks lend his fiction and nonfiction alike a distinctive breadth and documentary authority.
Sister Carrie establishes many of the concerns that run through the collection. A young woman comes to the city seeking opportunity and finds herself moving among the enticements and pitfalls of modern consumer culture. Dreiser’s portrait of urban spaces, theatrical worlds, and social thresholds provides a foundational exploration of desire, self-fashioning, and the market’s transforming power. Without sensationalizing, he observes how chance encounters and shifting fortunes shape an individual’s path. The novel’s blend of sympathy and analysis—its refusal to simplify motives or outcomes—introduces the moral complexity and social attentiveness that organize his broader body of work.
Jennie Gerhardt extends this social attention through a compassionate study of class and gender. Centering on a working-class heroine navigating unequal power relations, the novel examines how respectability, duty, and material necessity intersect. Dreiser foregrounds the quiet economies of family life and the weight of public judgment, following choices that are at once personal and structural. The narrative’s steady, humane gaze captures the everyday calculation required to survive, and the emotional cost of compromise. In its ethical seriousness and refusal to caricature, the book exemplifies Dreiser’s commitment to depicting lives shaped by forces larger than individual will.
The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic—often discussed together—trace the career of a formidable businessman and cast a panoramic light on American capitalism. Through shifting locales and evolving circumstances, Dreiser observes finance as a theater of risk, calculation, and appetite. The trilogy’s scale allows him to follow how power operates across institutions and decades, showing the interplay of enterprise, law, and public sentiment. Its interest lies less in melodramatic reversal than in the granular mechanics of ambition: negotiations, reputations, alliances, and the allure of expansion. These novels form a sustained inquiry into the energies and consequences of accumulation.
The "Genius" approaches ambition from a different angle, portraying an artist wrestling with the demands of creativity, personal desire, and the social norms that surround both. Dreiser uses the artist’s life to consider the costs of originality and the friction between private impulse and public expectation. The narrative engages with the conditions under which art is produced—money, patronage, reputation—and with the strain of reconciling artistic ideals to worldly realities. Its thematic kinship with the other novels is evident: aspiration meets constraint, and character is tested by circumstance. At the same time, its focus on art infuses the inquiry with aesthetic urgency.
An American Tragedy stands as a far-reaching study of aspiration and moral ambiguity in a modern industrial setting. Following a young man drawn to status and opportunity, Dreiser maps the social currents that shape his choices—work, family background, romance, and the allure of upward mobility. The novel’s force comes from its steady examination of motives and pressures rather than dramatic surprise. It is concerned with how ambition, insecurity, and public scrutiny intersect, and with the institutions—factory floors, boardinghouses, courts—that frame a life. The book’s breadth and sobering clarity amplify the collection’s central questions about freedom, responsibility, and fate.
Free and Other Stories condenses Dreiser’s naturalistic method into shorter forms, where decisive moments are rendered with sharp economy. These stories often turn on the ordinary dilemmas of work, marriage, and money, tracing how small shifts in opportunity or affection alter a life’s direction. The compression highlights Dreiser’s observational strengths: telling details of rooms and streets, the rhythms of conversation, and the persistent tug of desire. Read alongside the novels, the collection shows the same ethical patience at a different scale, demonstrating how environment, need, and chance combine to shape characters who remain vivid without ornament or sentimentality.
The Mighty Burke offers a focused instance of Dreiser’s short fiction, centering on a figure seen under the stress of public expectation and private calculation. The narrative examines how reputation is built, what it costs to sustain, and how external realities—work, community, contingency—press upon identity. As in his longer works, Dreiser relies on concrete circumstances and social texture rather than contrivance, inviting readers to consider action as the outgrowth of character situated in a specific milieu. The story stands as a compact demonstration of his method: patient detail, psychological candor, and the measured revelation of motive under pressure.
Twelve Men gathers profiles that reveal Dreiser’s reportorial eye and his interest in individual temperaments as expressions of a broader social world. These sketches do not seek spectacle; they attend to occupations, routines, and the quiet drivers of decision. By approaching his subjects through observed habit, economic circumstance, and remembered conversation, Dreiser builds portraits that are at once particular and representative. The book complements the fiction by showing the same commitments—sympathy, scrutiny, and a respect for the stubborn facts of experience—at work in nonfiction, thereby strengthening the collection’s claim to present a unified view of his literary practice.
Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub turns from narrative to reflection, offering essays on the wonder and strain of modern life. Here Dreiser articulates ideas that underlie his stories: the mystery of human motive, the influence of scientific thought on belief, the social machinery that frames opportunity, and the tensions between material progress and ethical aspiration. The essays’ exploratory tone—argumentative yet empirical—makes explicit the intellectual scaffolding of the fiction. Read together, these works reveal Dreiser’s consistent project: to confront the realities of desire and constraint with unsentimental clarity. That coherence, across genres, secures the enduring relevance of his body of work.
Author Biography
Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) was an American novelist and journalist whose stark, unornamented prose helped establish literary naturalism in the United States. Writing across the turn of the twentieth century into the interwar period, he probed the forces of urbanization, industry, and social stratification that shape individual lives. His best-known novels include Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, along with the Frank Cowperwood sequence The Financier and The Titan, concluded posthumously with The Stoic. Across fiction and nonfiction alike, Dreiser examined ambition, desire, and the contingencies of circumstance, challenging genteel conventions and widening the scope of subjects deemed suitable for serious American literature.
Dreiser was born in Indiana and raised in the Midwest in modest circumstances that attuned him to social precarity and the rhetoric of success. He attended Indiana University in the late 1880s but left due to financial constraints, turning instead to journalism. Early reporting assignments in the Midwest exposed him to the textures of urban life—immigrant neighborhoods, factories, and the new consumer culture—that would later inform his fiction. As a reader, he gravitated to the European naturalists, especially Émile Zola and Honoré de Balzac, and absorbed evolutionary and sociological ideas associated with Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, influences that underwrote his deterministic outlook.
Throughout the 1890s Dreiser worked as a reporter and feature writer before moving into magazine editing in New York, sharpening a documentary style attentive to detail and environment. His debut novel, Sister Carrie, appeared in 1900 and immediately met distribution resistance and moral controversy for its frank portrayal of desire and mobility in the modern city. Sales were initially weak and the book’s reach limited, but its reputation grew steadily among critics and writers who recognized its unsentimental realism. The novel’s attention to economic pressure, chance, and social performance announced Dreiser’s central concerns and marked a decisive break with genteel norms in American fiction.
In the 1910s Dreiser consolidated his reputation with novels that broadened his social canvas. Jennie Gerhardt (1911) examined class, gender, and the constraints of respectability. The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914) opened his sequence about the career of Frank Cowperwood, tracing the mechanisms of speculation, urban growth, and political influence in modern capitalism. The Genius (1915), a study of artistic ambition and personal turbulence, stirred further controversy for its candor. Shorter works from the decade—Free and Other Stories (1918) and Twelve Men (1919)—extended his interest in character studies and social milieu, while refining a prose method built on accumulation of concrete detail.
Dreiser was prolific in nonfiction as well. A Traveler at Forty (1913) and A Hoosier Holiday (1916) paired observation with autobiography, while Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1920) and The Color of a Great City (1923) gathered essays and sketches on culture and New York life. His major breakthrough came with An American Tragedy (mid-1920s), a sweeping study of ambition, class aspiration, and the contingencies of fate that secured his popular standing and critical stature. Subsequent volumes such as Dreiser Looks at Russia (late 1920s) and A Gallery of Women (1929) showed his range—from travel reportage and political inquiry to portraits—without abandoning his central preoccupation with power, desire, and social pressure.
Public debate often surrounded Dreiser’s work and pronouncements. He opposed censorship, defended controversial subjects, and participated in high-profile discussions of free speech and literary standards. In the early 1930s he published autobiographical volumes recounting his youth and newsroom years, clarifying the experiential sources of his themes and methods. He also engaged, at times directly, with labor struggles and economic injustice during the Depression era, reflecting his long-standing skepticism toward concentrated wealth and unregulated markets. Though he drew criticism for his polemical tone, his interventions were consistent with the social critique embedded in his fiction and with the naturalist conviction that literature should confront the conditions of its time.
In his later years, Dreiser continued to write while living in California, completing manuscripts that would appear after his death in the mid-1940s. The Bulwark (published posthumously) offered a more reflective moral inquiry, and The Stoic concluded the Cowperwood sequence, summing up decades of thinking about money, power, and character. Today his novels—especially Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy—remain staples of American literary study, valued for their expansive social vision, psychological immediacy, and challenge to comforting myths of upward mobility. Dreiser’s legacy endures in the work of later realists and social novelists and in ongoing scholarly debates about determinism, ethics, and the American dream.
Historical Context
Theodore Dreiser (born 27 August 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana; died 28 December 1945 in Hollywood, California) came of age as the United States accelerated from postbellum reconstruction into mass industrial modernity. Raised in Midwestern towns and educated briefly at Indiana University (1889–1890), he entered journalism in the early 1890s, reporting in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York. That apprenticeship in rapidly expanding cities furnished material for his fiction, stories, and essays. Across the decades spanned by Sister Carrie (1900) to the posthumous The Stoic (1947), Dreiser’s oeuvre charted the moral, economic, and technological transformations that reshaped American life from the Gilded Age through World War II.
The urban crucibles of Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia provided Dreiser with the social ecology of his characters and plots. Between 1870 and 1910, Chicago’s population soared from roughly 300,000 to over two million, while New York consolidated into Greater New York in 1898 and built northward toward Times Square. Consumer culture surged with department stores like Marshall Field’s and Wanamaker’s, professionalized advertising, and electrified street life. The migration of rural Americans and newly arrived immigrants into tenements and boardinghouses created dense neighborhoods of aspiration and precarity, the milieu animating both panoramic novels and shorter sketches of strivers, artists, clerks, and magnates.
Dreiser wrote against the backdrop of recurrent financial crises—particularly the panics of 1873, 1893, and 1907—that revealed the volatility of corporate capitalism. Philadelphia’s brokerage houses, Chicago’s traction empires, and Wall Street’s syndicates framed the rise and fall of titans. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 represented a structural attempt to tame these cycles, even as private consolidators such as J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, and their rivals shaped railroads and utilities. The career of Chicago traction magnate Charles T. Yerkes—linked to Philadelphia scandal and later London transit projects—exemplified the transregional, cosmopolitan finance Dreiser dramatized across the careers of his ambitious protagonists.
Mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe between the 1880s and World War I transformed the labor force that Dreiser observed as a reporter and portrayed in fiction. Ellis Island opened in 1892; Lower East Side tenements and Midwestern industrial districts filled with Poles, Italians, Jews, Slovaks, and others. These communities furnished domestic servants, factory operatives, sales clerks, and garment workers whose lives intersected with native-born migrants from farms and small towns. Labor conflict—marked by Haymarket (1886), Homestead (1892), and the Pullman Strike (1894)—underscored the precariousness that his characters confront, from rooming-house hunger to sudden windfalls, often governed less by virtue than by contingency.
The Progressive Era (circa 1890–1920) supplied Dreiser both subject matter and institutional vantage points. As an editor at Butterick’s The Delineator (1907–1910), he oversaw campaigns touching child welfare and adoption, aligning with broader reform currents that included muckraking exposures by Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair, and settlement work at Jane Addams’s Hull House (founded 1889). Antitrust prosecutions, municipal reform, and public health initiatives entered the vocabulary of urban life. His essays and portraits in Twelve Men (1919) and Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1920) reflect the investigative temper of the age, anatomizing the motives of success, philanthropy, corruption, and failure across social ranks.
Censorship and moral surveillance shaped Dreiser’s publication history and the reception of sexual candor and material appetite. The federal Comstock Act (1873) and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice policed "obscenity" well into the twentieth century. Sister Carrie (1900) appeared in the United States with minimal promotion after publisher misgivings, while The "Genius" (1915) was banned from sale in New York in 1916 and returned to circulation only after legal battles in the early 1920s. Such constraints, rooted in Victorian codes of respectability, collided with expanding urban freedoms, creating the friction that informs both Dreiser’s narratives and his public controversies.
Modern policing, forensic rhetoric, and death-penalty regimes supplied material for Dreiser’s exploration of crime and punishment. Sensational newspaper coverage of the 1906 Adirondack lake murder of Grace Brown and the conviction of Chester Gillette—executed by electric chair at Auburn Prison in 1908—exemplified the era’s fascination with moral panic, class anxiety, and the theatricality of trial procedure. The rise of criminology, the tabloid press, and penal spectacle intersected with America’s ambivalence toward capital punishment and social determinism. Dreiser’s interest in these forces reflected a broader critique of how law, public opinion, and economic aspiration conspire to shape individual fates.
Dreiser’s style was forged under the influence of European naturalism and American realism. Émile Zola’s determinism, Balzac’s social cartography, and the evolutionary thinking of Darwin and Herbert Spencer helped define his causal universe. Frank Norris, whose McTeague (1899) advanced naturalist fiction, supported the publication of Sister Carrie; Stephen Crane and Jack London exemplified adjacent currents. Against genteel conventions defended by William Dean Howells’s circle, Dreiser emphasized appetite, accident, and social force. The result is a literature that treats careers, relationships, and crimes as emergent from environments—corporate offices, boardinghouses, theaters, and courts—rather than from moral allegory, a method consistent across his novels, stories, and essays.
Changing gender roles and the political emergence of women formed a crucial context for Dreiser’s treatments of intimacy, work, and ambition. The expansion of female wage labor in retail and clerical sectors, the rise of the "New Woman," and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 reframed the terms of romance and autonomy. Urban leisure—millinery shops, department store counters, chorus lines, and vaudeville circuits—offered routes to visibility and vulnerability. Debates over birth control (Margaret Sanger opened a Brooklyn clinic in 1916), divorce reform, and the policing of vice exposed contradictions between public virtue and private desire that animate both his fiction and essays.
The mediascape Dreiser navigated spanned penny presses, mass-circulation magazines, and the emergent film industry. He contributed to and edited magazines within the national constellation of McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, and Butterick publications, where advertising and investigative features intertwined. Cinema’s rise introduced new narrative economies; the 1931 Paramount adaptation of An American Tragedy, directed by Josef von Sternberg, provoked Dreiser’s unsuccessful legal challenge but revealed the gravitational pull of Hollywood on serious fiction. Radio networks, tabloid sensationalism, and studio publicity further blurred boundaries between news, entertainment, and moral instruction—conditions reflected in the spectacle of trials, celebrity financiers, and theatrical careers across his oeuvre.
Cityscapes function as historical characters in Dreiser’s writing. Chicago’s rebuilding and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition broadcast technological confidence and aesthetic ambition; its streetcar systems and Loop skyscrapers dramatized congestion and mobility. New York’s consolidation, the 1904 renaming of Times Square, and Broadway’s electric dazzle recast theater and commerce. Philadelphia’s mercantile sobriety and political machines framed older forms of wealth and scandal. The built environment—tenements, hotels, department stores, brokerage offices, parks, and courts—structures encounters among classes and sets the stage for rises, falls, and reinventions that connect novels set in Chicago and New York with stories and portraits drawn from the same urban circuits.
World War I (1914–1918), the First Red Scare (1919–1920), Prohibition (1920–1933), and the consumer boom of the 1920s formed the volatile middle period of Dreiser’s career. Wartime mobilization and demobilization produced labor unrest and cultural fracture; anti-radical raids and sedition prosecutions coexisted with jazz-age hedonism and real-estate speculation. Automobiles—especially Ford’s Model T (introduced 1908)—reconfigured courtship, leisure, and crime, while highways connected factory towns with resort lakes and boom suburbs. Prohibition criminalized everyday desire and enriched bootleg syndicates, sharpening Dreiser’s interest in the gap between statute and appetite, and the ways markets circumvent moral regulation in both elite salons and working-class neighborhoods.
The Great Depression (after 1929) vindicated Dreiser’s skepticism about the self-correcting virtues of laissez-faire. Bank failures, breadlines, and mass unemployment altered the moral weather of his readership and reinforced his critique of speculative capitalism. He undertook public interventions, including the embattled 1931 Dreiser Committee inquiry into the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal fields, aligning him with labor causes that anticipated New Deal reforms. In his final years he moved to California, and in 1945 he joined the Communist Party USA. The Stoic (published in 1947) appeared posthumously, closing a trilogy that traced the fortunes of finance across crises from Reconstruction to the interwar world.
A transatlantic horizon broadened the geographical and economic canvas of Dreiser’s work. American capital sought opportunities in Europe even as European art and thought influenced U.S. letters. Charles T. Yerkes’s leadership in developing London’s underground railways around 1900 provided a model of American financial engineering abroad, a trajectory mirrored in characters who shuttle between New York, Chicago, and London. Dreiser’s own travels—to Europe and to the Soviet Union in 1927—fed his essays and sharpened his sense of comparative modernities. Commodity flows, exchange rates, and imperial trade patterns undergird the business plots while émigré cultures and cafés supply atmospheres for artists and clerks.
Evolving institutions of law and social welfare formed a crucial background to Dreiser’s moral anatomies. The first juvenile court opened in Chicago in 1899; New York’s Tenement House Act of 1901 and post–Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire labor regulations (after 1911) signaled a wavering public will to mitigate urban hazard. The electric chair, adopted in New York in 1890, became a macabre emblem of modern justice. Divorce law liberalization, charity organization societies, and private philanthropy coexisted with punitive policing. Across fiction and nonfiction, Dreiser tracks how these frameworks determine outcomes for lovers, entrepreneurs, and strays, revealing the state’s uneven hand in a market-driven society.
Popular amusements—boxing, baseball, vaudeville, circuses, and nickelodeons—supplied Dreiser with the rituals of aspiration and escape that cut across classes. Prizefighting’s public heroes, from John L. Sullivan (champion in 1882) to James J. Corbett (1892), Jim Jeffries (1899), and Jack Johnson (1908), embodied a modern spectacle of masculinity and ethnic rivalry. Coney Island, theater districts, and amusement parks mapped urban desire, while saloons and music halls doubled as employment bureaus and marketplaces of romance. Such milieus nourish stories of performers, managers, and patrons and illuminate how entertainment economies intersect with advertising, gambling, and hustling in the broader circuitry of urban capitalism.
Dreiser’s reputation consolidated through controversy and advocacy. H. L. Mencken and other modern critics championed him against defenders of the genteel tradition, arguing for an American literature adequate to the realities of industry, sex, and city life. Though he never received the Nobel Prize, his influence on writers such as Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, and Richard Wright is evident in their urban canvases and economic pessimism. The works assembled here—novels of ascent and downfall, short stories of chance and appetite, biographical sketches, and essays of social critique—collectively register America’s passage from Reconstruction’s residues to the mass media age.
Synopsis (Selection)
Sister Carrie
A small-town young woman moves to Chicago and then New York, drawn by the lure of work, love, and the stage. Her ascent is set against the decline of a man who risks respectability for her, revealing the pull of urban ambition and desire.
An American Tragedy
Clyde Griffiths, a restless striver, finds his romances and hunger for status driving him toward a catastrophic moral crisis. Set in industrial America, the story traces his rise from drifter to factory supervisor and the pressures that lead to legal and public consequences.
Jennie Gerhardt
A compassionate working-class woman becomes involved first with a powerful older man and later with a wealthy heir, as poverty and social stigma narrow her choices. Dreiser portrays the quiet costs of respectability and the compromises required for survival.
The "Genius"
A gifted Midwestern artist struggles to balance creative ambition and domestic fidelity while seeking recognition in Chicago and New York. The novel candidly depicts desire, marriage, and the pressures of commerce on artistic integrity.
The Financier
Frank Cowperwood, a prodigy of money and manipulation, rises in Civil War–era Philadelphia by exploiting markets and municipal politics. Personal entanglements and reformist backlash test his appetites and ruthlessness, opening Dreiser’s finance trilogy.
The Titan
Reborn in Chicago, Cowperwood builds a vast traction empire while battling civic reformers, social elites, and business rivals. The novel charts his audacity and the social costs of unbridled urban expansion.
The Stoic
The final phase of Cowperwood’s career unfolds across new financial frontiers and shifting personal alliances. It examines legacy, mortality, and whether relentless acquisition yields meaning.
Free and Other Stories
A collection of short fiction probing marriage, sexual longing, class aspiration, and the determinism of circumstance in American city and small-town life. From the title story’s portrait of a man yearning to escape a stifling union to vignettes of ambition and compromise, Dreiser’s naturalism is on display.
The Mighty Burke
A character study of a celebrated strongman in the public eye confronting the limits of strength and spectacle. Through public bravado and private doubts, it probes fame, masculinity, and the costs of physical prowess.
Twelve Men
Twelve biographical sketches portray workers, entrepreneurs, artists, and drifters Dreiser knew, rendered with reportorial detail and sympathy. Together they offer a cross-section of American character and circumstance in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub
Essays on society, art, science, sex, and belief argue for determinism and intellectual candor while critiquing American materialism and puritanism. The collection tests conventional morals and advances a skeptical, freedom-seeking outlook.
THEODORE DREISER: Novels, Short Stories, Essays & Biographical Works
Novels
Sister Carrie
Chapter I
The Magnet Attracting — A Waif Amid Forces
When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.
To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours — a few hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her sister’s address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be.
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility. The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the undoing of the unsophisticated and natural mind is accomplished by forces wholly superhuman. A blare of sound, a roar of life, a vast array of human hives, appeal to the astonished senses in equivocal terms. Without a counsellor at hand to whisper cautious interpretations, what falsehoods may not these things breathe into the unguarded ear! Unrecognised for what they are, their beauty, like music, too often relaxes, then weakens, then perverts the simpler human perceptions.
Caroline, or Sister Carrie, as she had been half affectionately termed by the family, was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair example of the middle American class — two generations removed from the emigrant. Books were beyond her interest — knowledge a sealed book. In the intuitive graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss her head gracefully. Her hands were almost ineffectual. The feet, though small, were set flatly. And yet she was interested in her charms, quick to understand the keener pleasures of life, ambitious to gain in material things. A half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoitre the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and subject — the proper penitent, grovelling at a woman’s slipper.
“That,” said a voice in her ear, “is one of the prettiest little resorts in Wisconsin.”
“Is it?” she answered nervously.
The train was just pulling out of Waukesha. For some time she had been conscious of a man behind. She felt him observing her mass of hair. He had been fidgetting, and with natural intuition she felt a certain interest growing in that quarter. Her maidenly reserve, and a certain sense of what was conventional under the circumstances, called her to forestall and deny this familiarity, but the daring and magnetism of the individual, born of past experiences and triumphs, prevailed. She answered.
He leaned forward to put his elbows upon the back of her seat and proceeded to make himself volubly agreeable.
“Yes, that is a great resort for Chicago people. The hotels are swell. You are not familiar with this part of the country, are you?”
“Oh, yes, I am,” answered Carrie. “That is, I live at Columbia City. I have never been through here, though.”
“And so this is your first visit to Chicago,” he observed.
All the time she was conscious of certain features out of the side of her eye. Flush, colourful cheeks, a light moustache, a grey fedora hat. She now turned and looked upon him in full, the instincts of self-protection and coquetry mingling confusedly in her brain.
“I didn’t say that,” she said.
“Oh,” he answered, in a very pleasing way and with an assumed air of mistake, “I thought you did.”
Here was a type of the travelling canvasser for a manufacturing house — a class which at that time was first being dubbed by the slang of the day “drummers.” He came within the meaning of a still newer term, which had sprung into general use among Americans in 1880, and which concisely expressed the thought of one whose dress or manners are calculated to elicit the admiration of susceptible young women — a “masher.” His suit was of a striped and crossed pattern of brown wool, new at that time, but since become familiar as a business suit. The low crotch of the vest revealed a stiff shirt bosom of white and pink stripes. From his coat sleeves protruded a pair of linen cuffs of the same pattern, fastened with large, gold plate buttons, set with the common yellow agates known as “cat’s-eyes.” His fingers bore several rings — one, the ever-enduring heavy seal — and from his vest dangled a neat gold watch chain, from which was suspended the secret insignia of the Order of Elks. The whole suit was rather tight-fitting, and was finished off with heavy-soled tan shoes, highly polished, and the grey fedora hat. He was, for the order of intellect represented, attractive, and whatever he had to recommend him, you may be sure was not lost upon Carrie, in this, her first glance.
Lest this order of individual should permanently pass, let me put down some of the most striking characteristics of his most successful manner and method. Good clothes, of course, were the first essential, the things without which he was nothing. A strong physical nature, actuated by a keen desire for the feminine, was the next. A mind free of any consideration of the problems or forces of the world and actuated not by greed, but an insatiable love of variable pleasure. His method was always simple. Its principal element was daring, backed, of course, by an intense desire and admiration for the sex. Let him meet with a young woman once and he would approach her with an air of kindly familiarity, not unmixed with pleading, which would result in most cases in a tolerant acceptance. If she showed any tendency to coquetry he would be apt to straighten her tie, or if she “took up” with him at all, to call her by her first name. If he visited a department store it was to lounge familiarly over the counter and ask some leading questions. In more exclusive circles, on the train or in waiting stations, he went slower. If some seemingly vulnerable object appeared he was all attention — to pass the compliments of the day, to lead the way to the parlor car, carrying her grip, or, failing that, to take a seat next her with the hope of being able to court her to her destination. Pillows, books, a footstool, the shade lowered; all these figured in the things which he could do. If, when she reached her destination he did not alight and attend her baggage for her, it was because, in his own estimation, he had signally failed.
A woman should some day write the complete philosophy of clothes. No matter how young, it is one of the things she wholly comprehends. There is an indescribably faint line in the matter of man’s apparel which somehow divides for her those who are worth glancing at and those who are not. Once an individual has passed this faint line on the way downward he will get no glance from her. There is another line at which the dress of a man will cause her to study her own. This line the individual at her elbow now marked for Carrie. She became conscious of an inequality. Her own plain blue dress, with its black cotton tape trimmings, now seemed to her shabby. She felt the worn state of her shoes.
“Let’s see,” he went on, “I know quite a number of people in your town. Morgenroth the clothier and Gibson the dry goods man.”
“Oh, do you?” she interrupted, aroused by memories of longings their show windows had cost her.
At last he had a clew to her interest, and followed it deftly. In a few minutes he had come about into her seat. He talked of sales of clothing, his travels, Chicago, and the amusements of that city.
“If you are going there, you will enjoy it immensely. Have you relatives?”
“I am going to visit my sister,” she explained.
“You want to see Lincoln Park,” he said, “and Michigan Boulevard. They are putting up great buildings there. It’s a second New York — great. So much to see — theatres, crowds, fine houses — oh, you’ll like that.”
There was a little ache in her fancy of all he described. Her insignificance in the presence of so much magnificence faintly affected her. She realised that hers was not to be a round of pleasure, and yet there was something promising in all the material prospect he set forth. There was something satisfactory in the attention of this individual with his good clothes. She could not help smiling as he told her of some popular actress of whom she reminded him. She was not silly, and yet attention of this sort had its weight.
“You will be in Chicago some little time, won’t you?” he observed at one turn of the now easy conversation.
“I don’t know,” said Carrie vaguely — a flash vision of the possibility of her not securing employment rising in her mind.
“Several weeks, anyhow,” he said, looking steadily into her eyes.
There was much more passing now than the mere words indicated. He recognised the indescribable thing that made up for fascination and beauty in her. She realised that she was of interest to him from the one standpoint which a woman both delights in and fears. Her manner was simple, though for the very reason that she had not yet learned the many little affectations with which women conceal their true feelings. Some things she did appeared bold. A clever companion — had she ever had one — would have warned her never to look a man in the eyes so steadily.
“Why do you ask?” she said.
“Well, I’m going to be there several weeks. I’m going to study stock at our place and get new samples. I might show you ‘round.”
“I don’t know whether you can or not. I mean I don’t know whether I can. I shall be living with my sister, and — ”
“Well, if she minds, we’ll fix that.” He took out his pencil and a little pocket note-book as if it were all settled. “What is your address there?”
She fumbled her purse which contained the address slip.
He reached down in his hip pocket and took out a fat purse. It was filled with slips of paper, some mileage books, a roll of greenbacks. It impressed her deeply. Such a purse had never been carried by any one attentive to her. Indeed, an experienced traveller, a brisk man of the world, had never come within such close range before. The purse, the shiny tan shoes, the smart new suit, and the air with which he did things, built up for her a dim world of fortune, of which he was the centre. It disposed her pleasantly toward all he might do.
He took out a neat business card, on which was engraved Bartlett, Caryoe & Company, and down in the left-hand corner, Chas. H. Drouet.
“That’s me,” he said, putting the card in her hand and touching his name. “It’s pronounced Drew-eh. Our family was French, on my father’s side.”
She looked at it while he put up his purse. Then he got out a letter from a bunch in his coat pocket. “This is the house I travel for,” he went on, pointing to a picture on it, “corner of State and Lake.” There was pride in his voice. He felt that it was something to be connected with such a place, and he made her feel that way.
“What is your address?” he began again, fixing his pencil to write.
She looked at his hand.
“Carrie Meeber,” she said slowly. “Three hundred and fifty-four West Van Buren Street, care S. C. Hanson.”
He wrote it carefully down and got out the purse again. “You’ll be at home if I come around Monday night?” he said.
“I think so,” she answered.
How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. Here were these two, bandying little phrases, drawing purses, looking at cards, and both unconscious of how inarticulate all their real feelings were. Neither was wise enough to be sure of the working of the mind of the other. He could not tell how his luring succeeded. She could not realise that she was drifting, until he secured her address. Now she felt that she had yielded something — he, that he had gained a victory. Already they felt that they were somehow associated. Already he took control in directing the conversation. His words were easy. Her manner was relaxed.
They were nearing Chicago. Signs were everywhere numerous. Trains flashed by them. Across wide stretches of flat, open prairie they could see lines of telegraph poles stalking across the fields toward the great city. Far away were indications of suburban towns, some big smokestacks towering high in the air.
Frequently there were two-story frame houses standing out in the open fields, without fence or trees, lone outposts of the approaching army of homes.
To the child, the genius with imagination, or the wholly untravelled, the approach to a great city for the first time is a wonderful thing. Particularly if it be evening — that mystic period between the glare and gloom of the world when life is changing from one sphere or condition to another. Ah, the promise of the night. What does it not hold for the weary! What old illusion of hope is not here forever repeated! Says the soul of the toiler to itself, “I shall soon be free. I shall be in the ways and the hosts of the merry. The streets, the lamps, the lighted chamber set for dining, are for me. The theatre, the halls, the parties, the ways of rest and the paths of song — these are mine in the night.” Though all humanity be still enclosed in the shops, the thrill runs abroad. It is in the air. The dullest feel something which they may not always express or describe. It is the lifting of the burden of toil.
Sister Carrie gazed out of the window. Her companion, affected by her wonder, so contagious are all things, felt anew some interest in the city and pointed out its marvels.
“This is Northwest Chicago,” said Drouet. “This is the Chicago River,” and he pointed to a little muddy creek, crowded with the huge masted wanderers from far-off waters nosing the black-posted banks. With a puff, a clang, and a clatter of rails it was gone. “Chicago is getting to be a great town,” he went on. “It’s a wonder. You’ll find lots to see here.”
She did not hear this very well. Her heart was troubled by a kind of terror. The fact that she was alone, away from home, rushing into a great sea of life and endeavour, began to tell. She could not help but feel a little choked for breath — a little sick as her heart beat so fast. She half closed her eyes and tried to think it was nothing, that Columbia City was only a little way off.
“Chicago! Chicago!” called the brakeman, slamming open the door. They were rushing into a more crowded yard, alive with the clatter and clang of life. She began to gather up her poor little grip and closed her hand firmly upon her purse. Drouet arose, kicked his legs to straighten his trousers, and seized his clean yellow grip.
“I suppose your people will be here to meet you?” he said. “Let me carry your grip.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’d rather you wouldn’t. I’d rather you wouldn’t be with me when I meet my sister.”
“All right,” he said in all kindness. “I’ll be near, though, in case she isn’t here, and take you out there safely.”
“You’re so kind,” said Carrie, feeling the goodness of such attention in her strange situation.
“Chicago!” called the brakeman, drawing the word out long. They were under a great shadowy train shed, where the lamps were already beginning to shine out, with passenger cars all about and the train moving at a snail’s pace. The people in the car were all up and crowding about the door.
“Well, here we are,” said Drouet, leading the way to the door. “Good-bye, till I see you Monday.”
“Good-bye,” she answered, taking his proffered hand.
“Remember, I’ll be looking till you find your sister.”
She smiled into his eyes.
They filed out, and he affected to take no notice of her. A lean-faced, rather commonplace woman recognised Carrie on the platform and hurried forward.
“Why, Sister Carrie!” she began, and there was embrace of welcome.
Carrie realised the change of affectional atmosphere at once. Amid all the maze, uproar, and novelty she felt cold reality taking her by the hand. No world of light and merriment. No round of amusement. Her sister carried with her most of the grimness of shift and toil.
“Why, how are all the folks at home?” she began; “how is father, and mother?”
Carrie answered, but was looking away. Down the aisle, toward the gate leading into the waiting-room and the street, stood Drouet. He was looking back. When he saw that she saw him and was safe with her sister he turned to go, sending back the shadow of a smile. Only Carrie saw it. She felt something lost to her when he moved away. When he disappeared she felt his absence thoroughly. With her sister she was much alone, a lone figure in a tossing, thoughtless sea.
Chapter II
What Poverty Threatened — Of Granite and Brass
Minnie’s flat, as the one-floor resident apartments were then being called, was in a part of West Van Buren Street inhabited by families of labourers and clerks, men who had come, and were still coming, with the rush of population pouring in at the rate of 50,000 a year. It was on the third floor, the front windows looking down into the street, where, at night, the lights of grocery stores were shining and children were playing. To Carrie, the sound of the little bells upon the horse-cars, as they tinkled in and out of hearing, was as pleasing as it was novel. She gazed into the lighted street when Minnie brought her into the front room, and wondered at the sounds, the movement, the murmur of the vast city which stretched for miles and miles in every direction.
Mrs. Hanson, after the first greetings were over, gave Carrie the baby and proceeded to get supper. Her husband asked a few questions and sat down to read the evening paper. He was a silent man, American born, of a Swede father, and now employed as a cleaner of refrigerator cars at the stock-yards. To him the presence or absence of his wife’s sister was a matter of indifference. Her personal appearance did not affect him one way or the other. His one observation to the point was concerning the chances of work in Chicago.
“It’s a big place,” he said. “You can get in somewhere in a few days. Everybody does.”
It had been tacitly understood beforehand that she was to get work and pay her board. He was of a clean, saving disposition, and had already paid a number of monthly instalments on two lots far out on the West Side. His ambition was some day to build a house on them.
In the interval which marked the preparation of the meal Carrie found time to study the flat. She had some slight gift of observation and that sense, so rich in every woman — intuition.
She felt the drag of a lean and narrow life. The walls of the rooms were discordantly papered. The floors were covered with matting and the hall laid with a thin rag carpet. One could see that the furniture was of that poor, hurriedly patched together quality sold by the instalment houses.
She sat with Minnie, in the kitchen, holding the baby until it began to cry. Then she walked and sang to it, until Hanson, disturbed in his reading, came and took it. A pleasant side to his nature came out here. He was patient. One could see that he was very much wrapped up in his offspring.
“Now, now,” he said, walking. “There, there,” and there was a certain Swedish accent noticeable in his voice.
“You’ll want to see the city first, won’t you?” said Minnie, when they were eating. “Well, we’ll go out Sunday and see Lincoln Park.
Carrie noticed that Hanson had said nothing to this. He seemed to be thinking of something else.
“Well,” she said, “I think I’ll look around tomorrow. I’ve got Friday and Saturday, and it won’t be any trouble. Which way is the business part?”
Minnie began to explain, but her husband took this part of the conversation to himself.
“It’s that way,” he said, pointing east. “That’s east.” Then he went off into the longest speech he had yet indulged in, concerning the lay of Chicago. “You’d better look in those big manufacturing houses along Franklin Street and just the other side of the river,” he concluded. “Lots of girls work there. You could get home easy, too. It isn’t very far.”
Carrie nodded and asked her sister about the neighbourhood. The latter talked in a subdued tone, telling the little she knew about it, while Hanson concerned himself with the baby. Finally he jumped up and handed the child to his wife.
“I’ve got to get up early in the morning, so I’ll go to bed,” and off he went, disappearing into the dark little bedroom off the hall, for the night.
“He works way down at the stock-yards,” explained Minnie, “so he’s got to get up at half-past five.”
“What time do you get up to get breakfast?” asked Carrie.
“At about twenty minutes of five.”
Together they finished the labour of the day, Carrie washing the dishes while Minnie undressed the baby and put it to bed. Minnie’s manner was one of trained industry, and Carrie could see that it was a steady round of toil with her.
She began to see that her relations with Drouet would have to be abandoned. He could not come here. She read from the manner of Hanson, in the subdued air of Minnie, and, indeed, the whole atmosphere of the flat, a settled opposition to anything save a conservative round of toil. If Hanson sat every evening in the front room and read his paper, if he went to bed at nine, and Minnie a little later, what would they expect of her? She saw that she would first need to get work and establish herself on a paying basis before she could think of having company of any sort. Her little flirtation with Drouet seemed now an extraordinary thing.
“No,” she said to herself, “he can’t come here.”
She asked Minnie for ink and paper, which were upon the mantel in the dining-room, and when the latter had gone to bed at ten, got out Drouet’s card and wrote him.
“I cannot have you call on me here. You will have to wait until you hear from me again. My sister’s place is so small.”
She troubled herself over what else to put in the letter. She wanted to make some reference to their relations upon the train, but was too timid. She concluded by thanking him for his kindness in a crude way, then puzzled over the formality of signing her name, and finally decided upon the severe, winding up with a “Very truly,” which she subsequently changed to “Sincerely.” She scaled and addressed the letter, and going in the front room, the alcove of which contained her bed, drew the one small rocking-chair up to the open window, and sat looking out upon the night and streets in silent wonder. Finally, wearied by her own reflections, she began to grow dull in her chair, and feeling the need of sleep, arranged her clothing for the night and went to bed.
When she awoke at eight the next morning, Hanson had gone. Her sister was busy in the dining-room, which was also the sitting-room, sewing. She worked, after dressing, to arrange a little breakfast for herself, and then advised with Minnie as to which way to look. The latter had changed considerably since Carrie had seen her. She was now a thin, though rugged, woman of twenty — seven, with ideas of life coloured by her husband’s, and fast hardening into narrower conceptions of pleasure and duty than had ever been hers in a thoroughly circumscribed youth. She had invited Carrie, not because she longed for her presence, but because the latter was dissatisfied at home, and could probably get work and pay her board here. She was pleased to see her in a way but reflected her husband’s point of view in the matter of work. Anything was good enough so long as it paid — say, five dollars a week to begin with. A shop girl was the destiny prefigured for the newcomer. She would get in one of the great shops and do well enough until — well, until something happened. Neither of them knew exactly what. They did not figure on promotion. They did not exactly count on marriage. Things would go on, though, in a dim kind of way until the better thing would eventuate, and Carrie would be rewarded for coming and toiling in the city. It was under such auspicious circumstances that she started out this morning to look for work.
Before following her in her round of seeking, let us look at the sphere in which her future was to lie. In 1889 Chicago had the peculiar qualifications of growth which made such adventuresome pilgrimages even on the part of young girls plausible. Its many and growing commercial opportunities gave it widespread fame, which made of it a giant magnet, drawing to itself, from all quarters, the hopeful and the hopeless — those who had their fortune yet to make and those whose fortunes and affairs had reached a disastrous climax elsewhere. It was a city of over 500,000, with the ambition, the daring, the activity of a metropolis of a million. Its streets and houses were already scattered over an area of seventy-five square miles. Its population was not so much thriving upon established commerce as upon the industries which prepared for the arrival of others. The sound of the hammer engaged upon the erection of new structures was everywhere heard. Great industries were moving in. The huge railroad corporations which had long before recognised the prospects of the place had seized upon vast tracts of land for transfer and shipping purposes. Street-car lines had been extended far out into the open country in anticipation of rapid growth. The city had laid miles and miles of streets and sewers through regions where, perhaps, one solitary house stood out alone — a pioneer of the populous ways to be. There were regions open to the sweeping winds and rain, which were yet lighted throughout the night with long, blinking lines of gas-lamps, fluttering in the wind. Narrow board walks extended out, passing here a house, and there a store, at far intervals, eventually ending on the open prairie.
In the central portion was the vast wholesale and shopping district, to which the uninformed seeker for work usually drifted. It was a characteristic of Chicago then, and one not generally shared by other cities, that individual firms of any pretension occupied individual buildings. The presence of ample ground made this possible. It gave an imposing appearance to most of the wholesale houses, whose offices were upon the ground floor and in plain view of the street. The large plates of window glass, now so common, were then rapidly coming into use, and gave to the ground floor offices a distinguished and prosperous look. The casual wanderer could see as he passed a polished array of office fixtures, much frosted glass, clerks hard at work, and genteel businessmen in “nobby” suits and clean linen lounging about or sitting in groups. Polished brass or nickel signs at the square stone entrances announced the firm and the nature of the business in rather neat and reserved terms. The entire metropolitan centre possessed a high and mighty air calculated to overawe and abash the common applicant, and to make the gulf between poverty and success seem both wide and deep.
Into this important commercial region the timid Carrie went. She walked east along Van Buren Street through a region of lessening importance, until it deteriorated into a mass of shanties and coal-yards, and finally verged upon the river. She walked bravely forward, led by an honest desire to find employment and delayed at every step by the interest of the unfolding scene, and a sense of helplessness amid so much evidence of power and force which she did not understand. These vast buildings, what were they? These strange energies and huge interests, for what purposes were they there? She could have understood the meaning of a little stone-cutter’s yard at Columbia City, carving little pieces of marble for individual use, but when the yards of some huge stone corporation came into view, filled with spur tracks and flat cars, transpierced by docks from the river and traversed overhead by immense trundling cranes of wood and steel, it lost all significance in her little world.
