Theodore Dreiser is one of the most penetrating observers of the greatest period of social change the United States has ever seen. Writing as America emerged as the world’s wealthiest nation, Dreiser chronicled industrial and economic transformation and the birth of consumerism with an unmatched combination of detail, sympathy, and power. The specially commissioned essays collected in this volume are written by a team of leading scholars of American literature and culture. They establish new parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Dreiser. This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read classics, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Dreiser’s representation of the city and his prose style. The volume investigates topics such as his representation of masculinity and femininity, and his treatment of ethnicity. It is the most comprehensive introduction to Dreiser’s work available.
EDITED BY
LEONARD CASSUTO
Fordham University
AND
CLARE VIRGINIA EBY
University of Connecticut
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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© Cambridge University Press 2004
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First published 2004
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Typeface Sabon 10/13 pt. System LATEX 2e [TB]
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data
The Cambridge companion to Theodore Dreiser / edited by Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby
p. cm. -- (Cambridge companions to literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 81555 X (hardback) -- ISBN 0 521 89465 4 (paperback)
Dreiser, Theodore, 1871--1945 -- Criticism and interpretation -- Handbooks, manuals,
etc. I. Cassuto, Leonard, 1960--. II. Eby, Clare Virginia. III. Series.
PS3507.R55Z575 2003 813′.52 -- dc21 2003055130
ISBN 0 521 81555 X hardback
ISBN 0 521 89465 4 paperback
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
| Notes on contributors | page vii | |
| Acknowledgments | x | |
| Chronology | xi | |
| Introduction | 1 | |
| LEONARD CASSUTO AND CLARE VIRGINIA EBY | ||
| Part I Backgrounds and contexts | ||
| 1 | Dreiser and the profession of authorship | 15 |
| JAMES L. W. WEST III | ||
| 2 | Dreiser and the uses of biography | 30 |
| THOMAS P. RIGGIO | ||
| 3 | Dreiser’s style | 47 |
| PAUL GILES | ||
| 4 | Dreiser and the history of American longing | 63 |
| JACKSON LEARS | ||
| Part II Dreiser and his culture | ||
| 5 | The matter of Dreiser’s modernity | 83 |
| BILL BROWN | ||
| 6 | Dreiser, class, and the home | 100 |
| CATHERINE JURCA | ||
| 7 | Can there be loyalty in The Financier? Dreiser and upward mobility | 112 |
| BRUCE ROBBINS | ||
| 8 | Dreiser, art, and the museum | 127 |
| MILES ORVELL | ||
| 9 | Dreiser and women | 142 |
| CLARE VIRGINIA EBY | ||
| 10 | Sister Carrie, race, and the World’s Columbian Exposition | 160 |
| CHRISTOPHER GAIR | ||
| 11 | Dreiser’s sociological vision | 177 |
| PRISCILLA WALD | ||
| 12 | Dreiser and crime | 196 |
| LEONARD CASSUTO | ||
| Select bibliography | 214 | |
| Index | 224 | |
BILL BROWN is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at The University of Chicago, where he also serves as a member of the Committee on the History of Culture, and as a member of the editorial board of Critical Inquiry. His publications include The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Harvard, 1996), A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, 2003), two edited volumes, Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Novels (Bedford, 1997), and a special issue of Critical Inquiry on “Things” (Winter, 2001).
LEONARD CASSUTO is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English department at Fordham University. He is the author of The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (Columbia University Press, 1997) and many articles about naturalist authors. He is currently at work on a cultural history of twentieth-century American crime fiction.
CLARE VIRGINIA EBY is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. She is presently editing the Dreiser Edition of The Genius and writing a biography of Ellen Rolfe Veblen.
CHRISTOPHER GAIR is a Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham, England. He is the author of Complicity and Resistance in Jack London’s Novels: From Naturalism to Nature (1997), and of numerous articles on American literature and culture in journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in American Fiction, and Studies in the Novel. He is currently completing a book on representations of whiteness in early twentieth-century American fiction.
PAUL GILES is Reader in American Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (2002); Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (2001); American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (1992); and Hart Crane: The Contexts of The Bridge (1986).
CATHERINE JURCA is Associate Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology. She is the author of White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton University Press, 2001). Her current project is a book on propaganda, public relations, and Hollywood film in the forties.
JACKSON LEARS was educated at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, and Yale University, where he received a Ph.D. in American Studies. He is the author of No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981 and Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History in 1995. He has also co-edited two collections of essays, The Culture of Consumption and The Power of Culture. His new book, Something for Nothing: Luck in America, has just been published by Viking Penguin. He has been a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications. He has taught at Yale University, the University of Missouri, New York University, and Rutgers University, where he is now Board of Governors Professor of History and editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review. He lives in western New Jersey with his wife, the artist Karen Parker Lears, and their two daughters.
MILES ORVELL is Professor of English and American Studies at Temple University, and Director of American Studies there. He is the author of The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940, of After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries, and of American Photography (in the Oxford History of Art Series). He is also the Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online. His current research is on museums.
THOMAS P. RIGGIO is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and General Editor of the Dreiser Edition.
BRUCE ROBBINS teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent book is Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York University Press, 1999). This essay is part of a work-in-progress on upward mobility stories.
PRISCILLA WALD is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. She is Associate Editor of American Literature and an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Medical Ethics and Humanities and the Center for Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy. She teaches and writes about American literature and culture with a concentration on ethnicity, science, law, and medicine. She is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Duke University Press, 1995), a study of legal, political, and literary representation in the nineteenth-century United States. She is currently working on two book-length projects. The first, “Cultures and Carriers: From ‘Typhoid Mary’ to ‘Patient Zero,’” explores the conceptual connections between theories of culture and contagion at the turn of the twentieth century and the social transformations and legal conflicts introduced by bacteriology and virology. The second, “Clones, Chimeras and Other Creatures of the Biological Revolution: Essays on Genetics and Popular Culture,” investigates the cultural narratives that inform popular understanding of genetics and their impact on bioethical discussions.
JAMES L. W. WEST is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of American Authors and the Literary Marketplace (1988) and of William Styron, A Life (1998). West has edited scholarly editions of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, and he is general editor of the Cambridge edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
All books are collaborations, but none more than edited collections. Accordingly, we’d like to begin by thanking our contributors for cheerfully meeting deadlines with work that we’ve enjoyed and learned from. Of the contributors, we are especially grateful to Tom Riggio for his advice along the way. Thanks also to Robert S. Levine for giving direction to this book at the outset, and to Ray Ryan for shepherding it through stages of development and production with insight and efficiency.
Finally, the editors would like to acknowledge the work of Philip Gerber, at whose conference on Dreiser we met in 1990. People in the field know how Phil’s scholarship has enriched Dreiser studies, but his support of young scholars is what we’ll always remember. Here’s to you, Phil.
| 1871 | Herman Theodore Dreiser (TD hereafter) is born in Terre Haute, Indiana, the ninth of ten surviving children born to Sarah Schänäb Dreiser and Johann Paul Dreiser. His father had emigrated from Germany in 1844 and had been proprietor of a wool mill until he lost his trade to a fire and disabling accident. His mother was of Pennsylvania Mennonite descent. During the seven years TD lived in Terre Haute, the impoverished family would occupy five different houses. |
| 1877 | At age six, TD goes to Catholic school, which he would attend intermittently for several years. |
| 1879 | To economize, Sarah Dreiser moves to Vincennes, Indiana to live with a friend, taking with her the three youngest children, including TD. Four children remain in Terre Haute, working to help support the family, along with TD’s father, now working as a foreman. Three children disperse. |
| 1879 | After discovering her friend is running a bordello, Sarah moves with the children to Sullivan, Indiana. |
| 1882 | In February, TD’s eldest brother, successful songwriter and entertainer Paul Dresser (who had Americanized the spelling of the family name), visits the impoverished clan in Sullivan. That spring, Paul establishes them in a furnished cottage in Evansville, Indiana, where he lives with girlfriend Sallie Walker (immortalized in his song, “My Gal Sal”). |
| 1884 | In the summer, Sarah and children move to Chicago, where her three eldest daughters were living. One of them, Mame, is involved with a prominent man twenty years her senior. In the fall, unable to meet Chicago expenses, Sarah and the three youngest move to Warsaw, Indiana, where TD enjoys his first public school experience. |
| 1886 | Family learns that sister Emma, who had moved back to Chicago, has run off with L. A. Hopkins, the married cashier of a Chicago bar from which he stole $3,500. They elope to Montreal, and settle in New York. (Their adventures would provide key plot elements for Sister Carrie.) Several months later, sister Sylvia announces she is pregnant by the son of a wealthy Warsaw family; the man refuses to marry her. TD and other young siblings feel ostracized and embarrassed. |
| 1887 | TD’s wastrel older brother Rome joins the family in Warsaw, followed by his unemployed and ailing father and two older sisters. In the summer, TD borrows six dollars from his mother and moves alone to Chicago, where he would work at odd jobs. The Warsaw contingent (including Sylvia’s illegitimate baby) later joins TD in Chicago. |
| 1889–90 | A Warsaw teacher, Mildred Fielding, arranges for TD, who had only completed one year of high school, to attend Indiana University, paying his living expenses. After one year in Bloomington, TD returns to Chicago. |
| 1890 | In November, Sarah Dreiser, aged fifty-seven, dies while TD holds her in his arms. |
| 1891 | In summer, the bereaved father is unable to assume family leadership, and the Dreiser family splits up again. |
| 1891 | After losing a job for petty theft, TD lands his first newspaper job, with the Chicago Globe Herald – not writing, but handing out Christmas gifts to the poor. |
| 1892 | TD begins writing political news and then Sunday features for the Chicago Globe. In November, he begins reporting for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat; later he is assigned a daily column, “Heard in the Corridors.” After scooping a railroad disaster, TD receives a promotion to drama critic. |
| 1893 | In April, after he is caught making up reviews of plays that did not appear, TD slinks off to the St. Louis Republic, writing feature stories. In the summer, TD is selected by the Republic to accompany a group of twenty schoolteachers to the Chicago World’s Fair. Among them is Sara Osborne White (aka “Sallie” and “Jug”), whom he will later marry. |
| 1894 | In March, TD moves to Grand Rapids, Ohio, to assist a friend taking over a local paper. Finding the work banal, TD quickly moves on to Toledo, where he hits it off with Blade city editor, Arthur Henry. Henry offers TD work reporting local street-car strike. When few other assignments are forthcoming, TD moves on to Cleveland, Buffalo, and then Pittsburgh, securing a position on Pittsburgh Dispatch. |
| 1894 | In July, TD visits Sara White at her family home in Montgomery City, Missouri. Then he visits brother Paul in New York, where he also sees sister Emma. In November, with $240 in savings, TD moves to New York. After rebuffs from various newspapers, TD is hired as space-rate reporter for the New York World. |
| 1895 | TD tries unsuccessfully to write articles and stories. He is hired by Howley, Haviland, and Company (a music production firm in which Paul is involved) to edit a monthly magazine to sell their music, Ev’ry Month, which debuts in October. TD writes much of the contents until quitting in the summer of 1897. |
| 1897 | TD collaborates with Paul in writing the popular ballad, “On the Banks of the Wabash.” |
| 1897–1900 | TD writes freelance journalism for magazines such as Success, Metropolitan, Cosmopolitan, Munsey’s, and Ainslee’s. |
| 1898 | On 28 December, TD marries Sara; the couple take an apartment in New York. |
| 1899 | In July, the Dreisers visit Arthur Henry and his wife, Maud, in Maumee, Ohio. With Henry’s encouragement, TD completes “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers,” the first of several short stories he will publish in the next two years (others include “Nigger Jeff” and “Old Rogaum and his Theresa”). When the Dreisers return to New York in September, Henry accompanies them. With Henry and Sara’s encouragement, TD begins Sister Carrie. |
| 1900 | After Sara and Henry edit Sister Carrie, TD submits it to Harper and Brothers, which rejects it. At Doubleday, Page and Company, the manuscript is enthusiastically supported by Frank Norris. Page agrees to publish it, but Doubleday fears it will not sell. The firm tries to pull out of the agreement, but TD fights to have it published. Due to Norris’s efforts, Sister Carrie was widely but tepidly reviewed. Doubleday refuses to publicize it, and the novel fades from view. TD would later claim that the “suppression” of Sister Carrie precipitated his neurasthenia (nervous breakdown) that lasted nearly three years. |
| 1900 | On Christmas day, TD’s 79-year-old father dies, exacerbating his son’s depression. |
| 1901 | Sister Carrie is published in England (by William Heinemann), to better reviews. TD works on two novels, “The Rake” (never published) and Jennie Gerhardt, completing forty chapters by the spring. He writes articles on the side. |
| 1901 | In summer, TD quarrels with Henry during visit to Dumpling Island, on Connecticut coast. Henry’s negative account of TD’s behavior appears the following year in An Island Cabin, further alienating the men. |
| 1901 | In the fall, TD secures a contract to publish The Transgressor (Jennie Gerhardt) with J. F. Taylor, but remains depressed over its slow progress. |
| 1902 | The Dreisers travel through the South. By January, TD’s depression has progressed to physical symptoms, including chest pains and headaches. By the summer, he has shelved Jennie Gerhardt. |
| 1903 | Destitute, TD sends Sara home to live with her family. At Paul’s urging, TD enrolls in a six-week treatment program in the Olympia Sanitarium in Westchester County. In June, TD acquires a job as a manual laborer for New York Central Railroad, working on Hudson River and living in Kingsbridge, New York. |
| 1904–06 | Largely recovered, TD resumes writing and editing, including working on an autobiography of his breakdown period (posthumously published as An Amateur Laborer), joining staff of New York Daily News, and editing Smith’s Magazine and Broadway Magazine. |
| 1906 | In January, brother Paul dies of a heart attack. |
| 1907 | Sister Carrie gains a second life when reissued by B. W. Dodge and Company (with TD as a major investor), to better reviews. |
| 1907 | TD becomes editor-in-chief of the Delineator, an organ of the Butterick Publishing Company, which produces women’s magazines. TD makes $5,000 annual salary and helps boost circulation considerably. |
| 1908 | TD meets H. L. Mencken, who writes some pieces for Delineator. |
| 1909 | TD meets, and soon falls in love with, seventeen-year-old Thelma Cudlipp, daughter of a Butterick co-worker. |
| 1910 | In the fall, Annie Ericsson Cudlipp tells TD’s bosses of his interest in her daughter and threatens to go to the newspapers. TD is fired in October; he also leaves Sara. Although TD gives October 1910 as the date of his separation, he continues to see his wife intermittently for nearly four years. |
| 1910 | TD resumes work on Jennie Gerhardt, finishing a draft in which Jennie and Lester Kane marry. Sara helps with the editing. |
| 1911 | After readers in his circle advise him that the happy ending rings false, TD revises Jennie Gerhardt. He also finishes a draft of The “Genius” and begins The Financier. In October, Jennie Gerhardt is published by Harper’s (after considerable cuts by the publisher and others) to some glowing reviews. In November, TD takes a European tour to research The Financier, simultaneously working on a travel book that will become A Traveler at Forty. Upon his return to New York (April 1912), TD works furiously on The Financier, which Harper’s convinces him to divide into a trilogy (The Trilogy of Desire). |
| 1912 | Wellesley graduate and TD’s lover, Anna Tatum, tells him a story about her Quaker family that will become the basis of The Bulwark. The Financier is published in October, to good reviews. In December, TD returns to Chicago for three months to continue research on the next volume of The Trilogy of Desire, and meets Chicago literati, including Floyd Dell, Edgar Lee Masters, John Cowper Powys, Sherwood Anderson, Margaret Anderson (of Little Review), Hamlin Garland, Henry Blake Fuller, and Little Theater actress Kirah Markham. |
| 1913 | TD returns to New York in winter, working on Traveler for Century and The Titan for Harpers. In summer, writes a short play, “The Girl in the Coffin.” In October, Kirah Markham arrives and lives intermittently with TD, who continues to see Sara on the side. |
| 1914 | Despite having advertised and begun to print The Titan, Harpers refuses to publish the novel, claiming it is too shocking. TD gets John Lane Company, a British firm with a New York branch, to take on the book, which is published in May. In the spring, TD begins a projected four-volume autobiography; he also works on some short, experimental plays later published as Plays of the Natural and Supernatural. By July, he is living in Greenwich Village, where he will remain for five years, some of the time living with Kirah Markham. |
| 1915 | In August, TD takes automobile trip to Indiana with Franklin Booth, an illustrator, to collaborate on book that will become A Hoosier Holiday. In October, The “Genius” is published by John Lane, and reviews are sharply divided. |
| 1916 | Kirah Markham leaves TD. |
| 1916 | Citing lewdness and obscenity, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice successfully demands that John Lane withdraw The “Genius” from sale. On the grounds of artistic freedom, Mencken leads a defense of the novel, supported by the Authors’ League of America, and gets 458 writers to sign an anti-censorship petition. |
| 1916 | In the fall, TD begins a lifelong friendship with Dorothy Dudley, whose Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free (1932) will be the first full-length study of the author. |
| 1916–19 | TD lives intermittently with Estelle Bloom Kubitz, whom he met through Mencken, who was dating Estelle’s sister Marion Bloom. Estelle works as TD’s secretary. |
| 1916 | TD works on The Hand of the Potter, his most ambitious play. Plays of the Natural and Supernatural is published. |
| 1917 | With no royalties coming in on The “Genius”, TD turns to writing short stories, and works on The Bulwark and Newspaper Days. He meets Louise Campbell of Philadelphia, who becomes his long-time literary adviser, as well as lover. |
| 1917 | TD meets Horace Liveright, of Boni and Liveright; TD agrees to their reissue of Sister Carrie. |
| 1917 | Mencken’s essay on TD appears in A Book of Prefaces. Despite Mencken’s praise for many aspects of Dreiser’s writing, his criticisms lead to a rift in their friendship. |
| 1918 | Boni and Liveright publishes Free and Other Stories. TD sells articles and stories to Harper’s Monthly and other periodicals. After the novel has been suppressed for two years, The “Genius” case comes to court, where it is thrown out on a technicality, leaving the novel still unavailable for sale. |
| 1919 | Boni and Liveright publishes Twelve Men, a book of biographical sketches compiled over twenty years, and The Hand of the Potter. |
| 1919 | TD meets and falls in love with Helen Patges Richardson; they go to Los Angeles together, where they live for three years. She pursues acting while TD tries to get his work filmed and labors intermittently on The Bulwark. |
| 1920 | While in California, TD begins focusing on the story that would become An American Tragedy. Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub, a collection of essays, published by Boni and Liveright. |
| 1921 | In December, Provincetown Players produce The Hand of the Potter. |
| 1922 | After completing twenty chapters of An American Tragedy, TD abandons what seems like a false start. He and Helen return to New York, taking separate apartments. The second volume of TD’s autobiography, A Book About Myself, is published. (Out of respect for family members, particularly his sisters, TD had withheld publication of the first volume, Dawn.) |
| 1923 | TD tours upstate New York with Helen, researching An American Tragedy. Boni and Liveright reissue The “Genius” (unavailable, except for a condensed serialization published in 1923 in Metropolitan magazine, since 1916), and publish The Color of a Great City. |
| 1924 | In March, Helen goes to the West coast, leaving TD in New York for several months. She returns in October to support him during the writing of An American Tragedy, in which he is assisted by Louise Campbell. |
| 1925 | In January, Helen and TD move to Brooklyn so he can concentrate on finishing the novel. |
| 1925 | In December, An American Tragedy is published by Liveright, to largely glowing reviews (though Mencken pans it). The novel becomes TD’s only bestseller and establishes him as one of America’s leading writers. It has never been out of print. |
| 1926 | Horace Liveright produces a Broadway play of An American Tragedy; TD and Liveright quarrel over fees. In June, TD and Helen travel to Europe, gathering material for The Stoic. |
| 1926 | Brief scandal over TD poem plagiarized from Sherwood Anderson. |
| 1927 | Revised and shortened version of The Financier is published. TD buys 37 acres near Mount Kisco, NY. TD invited to Russia, all expenses paid by the Soviet government, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories is published. |
| 1928 | TD writes favorable articles on the Soviet Union for Vanity Fair and other periodicals. Visits Woods Hole Biological Laboratory, which instigates his massive project to formulate a unified scientific philosophy. (The book would be published posthumously as Notes on Life.) TD meets Marguerite Tjader Harris. In November, Dreiser Looks at Russia is published; TD is accused of plagiarizing The New Russia by Dorothy Thompson (Sinclair Lewis’s wife), published two months earlier. A volume of poetry, Moods, Cadenced and Disclaimed, is also published. |
| 1929 | TD attends April trial over An American Tragedy, concerning 1927 suppression in Boston. Clarence Darrow argues unsuccessfully for the defense. |
| 1929 | Despite stock market crash, TD continues building Iroki, his country home in Mt. Kisco, New York. |
| 1929 | A Gallery of Women, a collection of sketches, published. |
| 1930 | Sinclair Lewis wins Nobel Prize. He is the first American author so honored, though many in the literary community feel that TD, also a finalist, deserved the prize. Lewis praises TD’s artistic leadership in his acceptance speech. |
| 1930–1 | Sergei Eisenstein prepares the film script of An American Tragedy. It is rejected by Paramount, which favors a version by Samuel Hoffenstein, to be directed by Josef von Sternberg. TD receives $55,000 for sound rights but strongly disapproves of the script, later suing Paramount to prevent distribution. The film appears in 1931, with some of the changes TD had demanded. |
| 1931 | TD slaps Sinclair Lewis at a party, creating a scandal. |
| 1931 | Dawn is published by Liveright, years after its original composition; critics are amazed by TD’s honesty, but his sisters are outraged. A Book About Myself republished, with the title TD originally wanted, Newspaper Days. |
| 1931 | TD writes articles on the arrests of communists, and supports Scottsboro defendants. Plays a prominent role in the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners investigation. Also involved in labor disputes of miners in Pittsburgh and then Harlan County, Kentucky, where workers were being prevented from joining a union. Liveright publishes Tragic America, a critique of capitalism. |
| 1932 | TD expresses interest in joining the Communist Party but is told his ideology does not conform. |
| 1932 | TD receives $25,000 for screen rights to Jennie Gerhardt (filmed by Paramount in 1933). |
| 1932–3 | TD resigns after a year’s involvement with American Spectator – which also featured Eugene O’Neill and George Jean Nathan on its editorial board – claiming the journal was insufficiently engaged with pressing social issues. Before TD’s departure, readers accuse him and other editors of publishing anti-Semitic remarks. The charge is maintained by author Hutchins Hapgood, and TD becomes embroiled in a public debate. Although he later retracts words he issued in anger, the charge of anti-Semitism would continue to haunt him. |
| 1934 | Following Liveright’s 1933 death, TD signs with Simon and Schuster. |
| 1934 | Rapprochement with Mencken. |
| 1935 | TD refuses to join the National Institute of Arts and Letters. |
| 1935 | Although under contract to complete The Stoic by the year’s end, TD travels to Los Angeles for assistance with his philosophical study. |
| 1938 | TD represents the League of American Writers in Paris at a Convention for International Peace, delivering a well-received speech. Later, he travels to Barcelona, where he sympathizes with the Spanish people. |
| 1938 | TD meets with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, urging that food be sent to Spain. |
| 1938 | TD settles permanently in California. He joins Helen, moving to Glendale, and later to Hollywood. |
| 1940 | TD is contracted by Veritas Press to write a book urging America to stay out of the war, published in 1941 by Modern Age Books as America is Worth Saving. |
| 1942 | False allegations of TD’s being pro-Nazi make international headlines. |
| 1942 | In October, Sara White Dreiser dies. |
| 1944 | TD accepts the Award of Merit from American Academy of Arts and Letters, which cites his “courage and integrity in breaking trail as a pioneer in the presentation in fiction of real human beings and a real America.” In June, he marries Helen Richardson. |
| 1945 | TD’s application for membership of the Communist Party is accepted in August. |
| 1945 | TD dies on 28 December, of heart failure. |
| 1946 | After editing by Louise Campbell and others, The Bulwark is published by Doubleday and Co. |
| 1947 | The Stoic is published, Helen including an appendix outlining TD’s plans for the ending. |
| 1981 | Sister Carrie, the first of the Pennsylvania Editions, is published. This ongoing series (recently renamed the Dreiser Edition) publishes alternate versions of TD’s works as he originally composed them, before second-party editing. |