Call Number:

Ms. Coll. 30

Repository:

University of Pennsylvania: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts

Extent:

244 linear feet (503 boxes)

Language:

English

Preferred Citation:

Theodore Dreiser papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania

Date:

circa 1890-1965 (bulk dates 1897-1955) (inclusive) and 1897-1955 (bulk)

Creator:

Dreiser, Theodore

Form:

Writings (documents), Manuscripts, American -- 20th century, Diaries, Memorabilia, Clippings (information artifacts), Financial records, Essays, Poems, Plays (performing arts compositions), Speeches, Short stories, American -- 19th century, Contracts, and Correspondence

Abstract:

Contains 22 series, including correspondence (118 boxes); legal matters (7 boxes); writings (260 boxes), comprising books, essays, short stories, poems, plays, screenplays, radio scripts, addresses, lectures, interviews, introductions, and prefaces; journals edited by Dreiser (6 boxes); notes (9 boxes); diaries (5 boxes); biographical material (1 box); memorabilia (41 boxes), comprising scrapbooks, photographs (many of which are available online), art work, promotional material, postcards, and miscellanea; financial records (5 boxes); clippings (23 boxes); works by others (12 boxes); and oversize materials (2 boxes). Also includes materials regarding various family members: brother Paul Dresser (8 boxes of correspondence, sheet music and lyric sheets, clippings and memorabilia, and two plays written by Dresser); second wife Helen Dreiser (4 boxes of diaries and other writings); and niece Vera Dreiser (2 boxes of correspondence).

During the Congress on Literature at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, Hamlin Garland expressed America's need for a new kind of literature. Garland called this new literature "veritism" and "local color"—something authentically American rather than derivative of Europe. At the same time, twenty-two-year-old Theodore Dreiser was in Chicago covering the World's Fair as a reporter for the St. Louis Republic. Although Dreiser did not attend the Congress on Literature, he was to play a principal role in the fulfillment of Garland's dream for American literature in the decades that followed.

(Herman) Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was born in Terre Haute, Indiana on 27 August 1871. He was a sickly child, the ninth in a family of ten surviving children (three older boys had died in infancy). Theodore's mother, Sarah Maria Schänäb, of Czech ancestry, was reared in the Mennonite faith on a farm near Dayton, Ohio. His father, John Paul Dreiser, was a German immigrant, who left Mayen in 1844 at the age of twenty-three to avoid conscription. He eventually traveled to America to follow his trade as a weaver, ending up at a mill in Dayton, Ohio, where he met the then seventeen-year-old Sarah. John Paul Dreiser was a devout Catholic, Sarah Schänäb, somewhat Protestant and decidedly pagan in her approach to the world—she was extremely superstitious and romantic. The couple ran off together and married in 1851, Sarah not quite eighteen, John Paul then twenty-nine. Sarah was immediately disowned by her family, militant anti-Catholics.

The couple settled first in Fort Wayne, Indiana and then in Terre Haute, where John Paul became quite successful in the woolen business. There were six children in the family in 1867 when the Dreisers moved to Sullivan, Indiana and John Paul borrowed significantly in the hopes of becoming an independent wool manufacturer. These hopes were destroyed in 1869 when his factory burned to the ground. John Paul was injured severely by falling timber as he tried to save his dream. By the time he recovered and moved his family back to Terre Haute, the Dreisers were deep in debt, for John Paul insisted on paying back every dollar that he owed. Discouraged to the point of despair, he abandoned his career and became obsessed with religion and the salvation of his family.

When Theodore Dreiser was born in 1871, his family was settled firmly in the depths of poverty. There were eight older siblings: Paul, Marcus Romanus (known as Rome), Mary Frances (Mame), Emma, Theresa, Sylvia, Al, and Claire. Younger brother Ed would follow two years later. Dreiser's father was only sporadically employed. The older children were out of the home, picking up what work they could, mostly getting into trouble. The family had a reputation in Terre Haute for being behind in their bills with wild sons and flirty daughters. Each morning they knelt around the father as he asked for a blessing for the day, and there was a similar blessing each night. Despite these prayers and stern punishments at the hand of John Paul, it was too late. The older boys ran away from home; the older girls were involved in affairs. The Dreiser family was out of control, abetted by Sarah's leniency toward her children.

Young Theodore Dreiser grew up in this environment of uncertainty. He often went to bed hungry. There was no money for coal, and Theodore would go with his older brother Al to pick some up along the tracks of the railroad. His mother took in washing and worked at scrubbing and cleaning. Always sensitive, Theodore was humiliated to wear ragged clothing and to sneak coal from the tracks. He stuttered; he cried easily; he was a homely child, with protruding teeth and a cast in one eye. Thin, pale, bullied by other boys, he spent his days alone for the most part. Yet Dreiser was also intensely curious about life, watching sunrises, observing birds in flight, exploring the Indiana countryside. He hated his father's world of censored joy and authority and loved his mother's romantic dreams. Dreiser realized that his family was poor and that they were looked down upon; he dreamed of having a home like those of the wealthy on Wabash Avenue, of having money and fine clothing.

Within Theodore Dreiser's harsh world of poverty there was always a contrasting element of the fantastic. First it was his mother's world of fancy—the family constantly moved at her whim, for she was always certain that something better was just over the horizon. As he grew older, the world of the wealthy town became his fantasy. Then there was the fantastic success of his oldest brother, Paul Dreiser. Paul had left home, joined a minstrel troupe, and achieved much success with his musical talents. Writing, singing, and performing in minstrel shows, he even changed his name to Paul Dresser, which he felt would be more memorable to his public.

When Theodore was twelve he moved with his mother to Chicago where his older sisters had secured an apartment. Again there was the fantastic contrast of his old life in a small Indiana town to the city, with its size, its activity, and its color. The ways of the city would continue to fascinate Dreiser throughout his life. When the venture in Chicago failed, Theodore's mother moved him to Warsaw, Indiana, near where she had some land that had been left to her by her father.

It was in Warsaw that Theodore first attended a non-Catholic school. Instead of the fear and trepidation of his earlier education, he found encouragement, first in the person of twenty-one-year old May Calvert, his seventh grade teacher. Miss Calvert took an interest in Theodore, encouraging him to use the local library and his imagination. She remained his life-long friend and confidant. At the age of seventeen, in a hardware store in Chicago where Theodore had found work, he met up with a former teacher, Mildred Fielding, now principal of a Chicago high school. Miss Fielding had seen promise in him as well, thought him deserving, and wanted to send him to Indiana University at her own expense. In the fall of 1889 Dreiser arrived at the Bloomington campus.

Dreiser spent only a year at Indiana University. The experience showed him a world of possibilities, but he felt socially outcast and unsuccessful and was not really stimulated by any of his courses. Theodore returned home, now almost nineteen years old, and found a job in a real estate office. He enjoyed some success in this field and gained a bit of confidence. That fall, however, his mother became ill. On 14 November 1890, Theodore came home for lunch to find her in bed. As he helped her sit up, she went limp: Sarah Dreiser died in her son's arms at the age of fifty-seven. Theodore, always his mother's favorite because he was so slight and sensitive, felt alone in the world. The Dreiser family, only held together at this point by Sarah's love for all, fell irreparably apart.

Theodore drifted into one job after another: driver for a laundry; collector for a furniture store. While these jobs provided him with an income, none allowed for the expression of ambition and artistic ability that he felt within. In his memoirs Dreiser stated that it occurred to him at that time that newspaper reporters were men of importance and dignity, who by dint of interviewing the great were perceived their equal. It was now 1892 and Theodore had returned to Chicago, which was preparing for the upcoming World's Fair and the Democratic National Convention. Dreiser was curious enough about these events to write his own news stories about them, finding his to be as good as those published in the papers. In June of 1892—after much determined footwork on his part—Theodore Dreiser landed a job on the Chicago Globe.

Dreiser's intense curiosity about life was well-suited to work as an investigative journalist. In Chicago and later, in 1893 when he went to St. Louis to work for the Globe-Democrat and the Republic, Dreiser became known for his human interest pieces and "on-the-scene" reporting style: his articles were written in a manner that put the reader at the tragedy of a local fire or the action of a public debate.

It was at the Republic in 1893 that Dreiser was given the job of escorting twenty female St. Louis school teachers to the Chicago World's fair and to write about their activities on the journey. One of these was Sara Osborne White, twenty-four and two years older than Dreiser. She came from Montgomery City, seventy-five miles west of St. Louis. Dreiser fell in love with her figure, dark eyes, and thick red hair (it was this last feature which led her friends and family to call her by the nickname "Jug," for her hair was so thick around her face that it was said to resemble a red jug). Dreiser, desiring her and aching for a chance to fulfill his always pressing sexual needs, took little time to propose.

Dreiser, however, was also driven by a desire for fame. His brother Paul showed up in St. Louis, and his talk of New York was alluring. Theodore was ready for a change. A young reporter friend on the Republic told him of a country weekly in his home town of Grand Rapids, Ohio, which could be purchased for very little. Dreiser thought that he could have great success on his own. In 1894, with promises to send for Jug soon, Dreiser boarded a train for Ohio.

He arrived to find that the paper was small, with a subscribership of less than five hundred. The office was a shambles. There wasn't enough to it to even attempt to make a go, Dreiser thought. He moved on to Toledo, where he asked for a job from the city editor of the Toledo Blade, twenty-six year old Arthur Henry. The two men got along quite well, and Henry found a few reporting assignments for Dreiser. Henry was an aspiring poet and novelist; Dreiser was aspiring to be a playwright. The men spent hours in talk about their literary dreams. Unfortunately, no permanent opening materialized at the Blade, and Dreiser moved on to Cleveland to look for work. After doing some feature work for the Leader, he moved to Pittsburgh in the same year, where he immersed himself in research and articles concerning labor disputes that had culminated in the Great Strike of 1892 at Homestead. From there he went to New York and received a job at Pulitzer's paper, The World, which was leading the fight in the yellow journalism war against Hearst's Journal. He covered a streetcar strike in Brooklyn by actually going out and riding the rails during the strike to see angry workers confronting scab drivers. He later incorporated these impressions into his first novel, Sister Carrie.

Dreiser was drawn to the contrasts between the wealthy and the poverty stricken in New York. He quit his job at The World after only a few months, because he wasn't being allowed to produce the type of human interest stories that he thought should be told. He then lived, partly by choice and partly by necessity, on the streets of New York, where he took in the life of the downcast. At last he turned up at the New York offices of Howley, Haviland & Company, the music publishing firm run by his brother Paul and associates. He proposed to the men the idea of selling a magazine of popular songs, stories, and pictures. He would edit the magazine and it would help sell the company's songs. Thus, in 1895 Dreiser became "Editor-Arranger" for Ev'ry Month, "the Woman's Magazine of Literature and Music." In addition to writing his own "Reflections" column for each issue—in which he set forth his philosophies on such varied topics as the possibility of life on Mars, working conditions in the sweat shops, yellow journalism, and the plight of New York's poor—Dreiser also solicited syndicated stories by the better known American writers of his day, such as Stephen Crane and Bret Harte.

After Ev'ry Month turned into a losing venture in 1897, Dreiser freelanced articles for various magazines. He was one of the original contributors to Success magazine, for which he interviewed the successful men of his time: Andrew Carnegie, Marshall Field, Philip D. Armour, Thomas Edison, and Robert Todd Lincoln. As the twentieth century approached, Dreiser wrote articles on the advances of technology, with titles like "The Horseless Age" and "The Harlem River Speedway" for some of the most popular magazines of the day, such as Leslie's, Munsey's, Ainslee's, Metropolitan, Cosmopolitan, and Demorest's. He compiled the first article ever written about Alfred Stieglitz, who seemed to combine in one Dreiser's interest in art and technology.

This writing set him in good straits financially. He now could afford to marry Jug, a marriage that, in spite of second thoughts on his part, he undertook in a very small ceremony in Washington, D.C., on 28 December 1898. The Dreisers took up residence in New York, but in the summer of 1899, at the request of Arthur Henry, made an extended visit to Ohio. Henry thought that it was time for Dreiser to work on his fiction.

Together the two men spent the summer churning out articles and splitting the money that they earned fifty-fifty, thus giving each the time to work on his literary endeavors. It was here that Dreiser began Sister Carrie. At the same time he became interested in the plight of workers in the South. He did a series of special articles for Pearson's Magazine, which included investigations of a "Model Farm" in South Carolina, Delaware's "Blue Laws," and Georgia's "Chain Gangs." All three dealt with society's punishment of those who transgressed, a theme that Dreiser would investigate thoroughly in his novels. In addition, Dreiser wrote six special articles on the inventor Elmer Gates, who had invested the money gained from his inventions on a facility for psychological research: it was called the Elmer Gates Laboratory of Psychology and Psychurgy. Gate's studies of learning, perception, the physiological effects of the emotions, and the will underlay the ways in which Dreiser shaped Hurstwood's actions in Sister Carrie.

Journalism remained a steady source of income for Dreiser throughout his life and supported his literary endeavors—he became a top editor for Butterick's Delineator in 1907, a silent publisher of the Bohemian in 1909, and in the 1930s an editor of The American Spectator. The events that led up to the publication of Sister Carrie in 1900, however, began a new phase in Dreiser's career—that of the heavily-edited novelist. Before the book was published, Dreiser was forced to change all names that could be attached to any existing firms or corporations. All "swearing" was to be removed. Frank Doubleday demanded that the novel have a more romantic title, and on the original contract the work bears the name "The Flesh and the Spirit," with Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" penciled in beside it. Editing was performed even after Dreiser returned the author's proofs to Doubleday, Page & Co. When Frank Doubleday read the final draft (after, by the way, Page had already signed the contract with Dreiser), he pronounced the book "immoral" and "badly written" and wanted to back out of its publication. Dreiser held Doubleday, Page to its word, however, and Sister Carrie was printed; but only 1,000 copies rolled off the presses, and 450 of these remained unbound. It was not listed in the Doubleday, Page catalogue. The firm refused to advertise the work in any way. A London edition of Sister Carrie (published in 1901), however, did well and was favorably reviewed. The London Daily Mail said: "At last a really strong novel has come from America."

Dreiser would spend his entire literary career struggling with editors, publishers, and various political agencies, all of whom desired to make his works "suitable for the public." Although Dreiser began his second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), upon completion of Sister Carrie, his intense dissatisfaction with the changes and complaints that the publishers had made, combined with the treatment that Sister Carrie was receiving, caused him to lose his health and delayed completion of Jennie Gerhardt for nearly ten years. In 1916 Dreiser, along with H. L. Mencken, fought against the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice when its president, John Sumner, forced withdrawal of The "Genius" (published in 1915) from bookstore shelves. The fight dragged on through 1918, and The "Genius" remained in storerooms until 1923, when it was re-issued by Horace Liveright.

In 1927 Liveright was to become involved in Dreiser's biggest battle for freedom of literary expression, when Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), the story of the Chester Gillette-Grace Brown murder case, was banned in Boston. Clarence Darrow was a witness for the defense. The case lingered in the courts, at great expense to both Dreiser and the Liveright firm.

Between beginning the writing of The "Genius" and publishing An American Tragedy, Dreiser was prolific. He published the first two novels in his Cowperwood trilogy, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914); a book of travel articles entitled A Traveler At Forty (1913); a collection of plays, Plays of the Natural and Supernatu ral (1916); and a travelogue of his experiences on a car trip through his home state of Indiana, A Hoosier Holiday (1916). These were followed with Free and Other Stories in 1918; Twelve Men in 1919; The Hand of the Potter (a Tragedy in Four Acts) also in 1919; Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub in 1920; A Book About Myself, 1922; and The Color of A Great City in 1923.

In the meantime, Dreiser was beginning a third phase in his career, champion of freedom in all aspects of life. He made his first trip to Europe in 1912, and in London he picked up a prostitute and cross-examined her about life. He visited the House of Commons and was sickened by the slums of the East End. This experience, combined with a seeming inferiority complex on his part at the self-assurance apparently inborn in the British caused Dreiser to developed a life-long hatred of the British and may have had something to do with his sympathy for Germany during World War I. Back home in the United States he tried to organize a society to subsidize art and championed the causes of oppressed artists like himself.

After the publication of An American Tragedy, Dreiser was more highly sought after by political organizations than before. In 1926, while visiting Europe, he commented on the events occurring in Germany: "Can one indict an entire people?" The answer, he felt, was yes. In 1927 Dreiser was invited to the U.S.S.R. by the Soviet Government. The Soviets thought that Dreiser's opinion of their nation would have weight in America and that he would be favorable to their system of government (Dreiser's books sold well in the Soviet Union). During the visit Dreiser met with Soviet heads of state, Russian literary critics, movie directors, and even Bill Haywood, former American labor leader. Dreiser kept extensive journals of the trip. He approved of the divorce of religion from the state, praised new schools and hospitals, but was repelled by the condition of hundreds of stray children scattered about the country. In 1928 Dreiser visited London, where he met with Winston Churchill, with whom he discussed Russia's social and military importance. He also took time to criticize the working conditions of mill workers in England.

Dreiser escalated these political involvements throughout his life. He helped bring former Hungarian premier Count Michael Károly to the United States after the Communist takeover in 1930. During the 1930s he addressed protest rallies on behalf of Tom Mooney, whom he visited in San Quentin, where Mooney was serving a term for his alleged participation in a bombing incident in San Francisco. Dreiser met with Sir Rabindranath Tagore in 1930 to discuss the success of the Soviet government and the hopes of India. In 1931 Dreiser cooperated with the International Labor Defense Organization and took an active part in the social reform program of the American Writers' League, of which he would later become president.

In 1931, as chairman of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, Dreiser organized a special committee to infiltrate Kentucky's Harlan coal mines to investigate allegations of crimes and abuses against striking miners. Dreiser's life was threatened for calling attention to the matter. Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and others on the "Dreiser Committee," as it was called, were indicted by the Bell County Grand Jury for criminal syndicalism, and a warrant was issued for Dreiser's arres t. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of New York at the time, said he would grant Dreiser an open hearing, and John W. Davis agreed to defend the Committee. Due to widespread publicity and public sentiment, however, all formal charges against Dreiser and the Committee were dropped.

Dreiser became even more involved with social reform after this incident. In 1932 he met with members of the Communist Party in the United States. Dreiser criticized the U. S. Communist Party for being too disorganized. That year he was invited to write for a new literary magazine that would be free of advertising, the American Spectator. Dreiser became and remained associate editor of the paper until other editors agreed to accept advertising, at which point he resig ned. In 1937 Dreiser attended an international peace conference in Paris, because he was interested in the outcome of the Spanish Civil War. When he returned from Europe, he visited with President Roosevelt to discuss the problem and to try to influence him to send aid to Spain. In 1939 Dreiser again traveled to Washington, D.C. and to New York to lecture for the Committee for Soviet Friendship and American Peace Mobilization. He published pamphlets at his own expense and radio addresses. He publishe d America Is Worth Saving, a work concerning economics and intended to convince Americans to avoid involvement in World War II. In 1945, just before his death, Dreiser joined the Communist Party to signify his protest again st America's involvement in the war.

During these years, Dreiser was still publishing—articles, poems, pamphlets, leaflets, and novels. In 1926 he brought out an edition of poetry, Moods: Cadenced and Declaimed. Chains followed in 1927, a book of short stories and "lesser novels." Other works include: Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928); The Carnegie Works at Pittsburgh (1929); A Gallery of Women (1929); My City (1929); Fine Furniture (1930); Dawn (1931); Tragic America (1931); and America Is Worth Saving (19 41). In addition, Dreiser was working on several things at the time of his death, some of which were published posthumously: The Bulwark (1946); The Stoic (1947); and a philosophical and scie ntific treatise that would later be edited and published by Marguerite Tjader and John J. McAleer and titled Notes on Life (1974).

There were many sides to Theodore Dreiser, beyond his literary and political efforts. He was greatly interested in scientific research and development; he collected a great many books and much information on the latest scientific concerns. In 1928 he met Jacques Loeb of the Rockefeller Institute and visited the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Later visits to the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California and the California Institute of Technology would impress him greatly. He had a longstanding correspondence with Dr. A. A. Brill, psychologist, who was largely responsible for introducing Jungian and Freudian analysis to New York. He also championed the works of Charles Fort, a "free-thinker" who was determined to establish that science was "unscientific" and that his own vision of the universe as a place where "anything could happen and did" (Swanberg, 224) was the correct one. Dreiser was particularly fascinated with genetics, which he felt explored the true "mysteries of life." In 1933, he attended the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, specifically with the intent of working on a number of scientific essays, which he continued to compile over his lifetime (and which would later find their way into Notes On Life).

Another area of special interest for Dreiser was philosophy, a subject that he explored in great detail and about which he collected and wrote extensively. His tastes ranged from Spencer to Loeb and from Social Darwinism to Marxism. His published and unpublished writings indicate that Dreiser drew heavily on such philosophers and philosophies to confirm his own views of the nature of man and life.

No biography of Theodore Dreiser would be complete, however, if it did not touch upon his personal life: as one friend put it, it is hard to understand how Dreiser could be so concerned about humanity and at the same time so utterly cruel to an individual human being. His marriage to Sara Osborne White was on shaky ground from the start: he never seemed able to devote himself to one woman. As Sara herself put it: "All his life [Theo] has had an uncontrollable urge when near a woman to lay his hand upon her and stroke her or otherwise come into contact with her" (Swanberg, 137). The two separated in 1910, with Sara returning to Missouri for a time (she would later move to New York on her own) and Dreiser moving on to other women. In 1919, Helen Patges Richardson, a second cousin to Dreiser (her grandmother and Dreiser's mother were sisters), showed up at his doorstep, making the long journey from her home state of Oregon to meet her New York cousins. She would become Dreiser's companion for the rest of his life; they eventually married in 1944. Their relationship was stormy at best: Dreiser never changing his ways with regard to other women, Helen persisting—perhaps beyond all reason—in her devotion to his genius. As she phrased it: "He expected his complete freedom, in which he could indulge to the fullest, at the same time expecting my undivided devotion to him" (Swanberg, 290). In November 1951 Helen had the first of several strokes that would eventually incapacitate her; she moved to Oregon to live with her sister, Myrtle Butcher, and died in 1955.

In addition to his infidelities with regard to women, Dreiser's professional relationships were periodically marred by scandal. He was in the habit of lifting material directly from sources and including it, for the most part, unchanged in his works. Many readers of An American Tragedy, for example, who lived in the Herkimer County area (where the Chester Gillete-Grace Brown incident had occurred), wrote to Dreiser concerned that his book contained sentences lifted directly from court documents or local newspapers. In 1926 it was announced by a knowing reader that Dreiser's poem "The Beautiful," published in the October issue of Vanity Fair, was a plagiarism of Sherwood Anderson's poem "Tandy." Since Dreiser and Anderson were friends, the incident blew over rather quickly.

Such was not the case, however, in 1928, when Dorothy Thompson accused Dreiser of plagiarizing her serialized newspaper articles regarding her trip to Russia (she and Dreiser had been there together) in his book Dreiser Looks At Russia (Ms. Thompson had published these articles in her own collected work, The New Russia, two months prior to Dreiser's publication). Ms. Thompson filed suit against Dreiser, and the press took Dreiser to task on this and earlier cribs. Although Dorothy Thompson eventually dropped her suit, it colored the opinion of some of Dreiser's colleagues towards his works. It also led to another ugly incident in 1931, when at a dinner at the Metropolitan Club honoring visiting Russian novelist, Boris Pilnyak, Sinclair Lewis (Dorothy Thompson's husband and at that year's winner of the Nobel Prize in literature) stood up to speak to the gathered literary notables and, after stating his pleasure at meeting Mr. Pilnyak, added: "But I do not care to speak in the presence of one man who has plagiarized 3,000 words from my wife's book on Russia" (Swanberg, 372). At the end of the reception that followed, Dreiser walked over to Lewis and demanded explanation. Lewis repeated his accusation, at which point, Dreiser slapped his face. Lewis, undaunted, repeated the accusation a third time and received a second slap. Again, the incident was widely publicized in the papers and fueled an aversion on the part of many for Dreiser's private self.

Yet despite his personal and public scandals, Dreiser's achievements in establishing a truly American literature and his one-man crusade for social justice set standards for those of his time and those who would follow. Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Pas sos, James T. Farrell, Edgar Lee Masters, H. L. Mencken, Upton Sinclair—these and many others— acknowledged publicly or privately a debt owed to the example of Dreiser. In a final tribute to Dreiser, upon his death in 1945, H. L. Mencken wrote:

‥ no other American of his generation left so wide and handsome a mark upon the national letters. American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin. He was a man of large origi nality, of profound feeling, and of unshakeable courage. All of us who write are better off because he lived, worked and hoped. (Swanberg, 527)

The Theodore Dreiser collection at the University of Pennsylvania Library is the principal repository for books and documents concerning Dreiser's personal and literary life. The Collection at large includes Dreiser's own library and comprehensive holdings in both American and foreign editions of his writings, as well as secondary works. At the heart of the Collection, however, are the Theodore Dreiser Papers. They comprise 503 boxes and include correspondence; manuscripts of published and unpublished writings; notes; diaries; journals edited by Dreiser; biographical material; memorabilia, including scrapbooks, photographs, postcards, promotional material, art, and personal possessions; financial and legal records; clippings covering Dreiser's literary life, beginning with his career as a newspaper reporter in the 1890s; and microfilms of material housed in this and other collections. Also contained in the Papers are correspondence, works, and memorabilia of Dreiser's brother, Paul Dresser; his second wife, Helen Patges (Richardson) Dreiser; and his niece, Vera Dreiser Scott. Finally, the Papers include works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that were sent to Dreiser, as well as works that were written about him. Although the Papers contain documents dated as early as 1858 and as late as 1982, the bulk of the materials falls between the years 1897 and 1955.

Dreiser's initial bequest of materials to the University of Pennsylvania occurred in 1942; shipments continued until 1955, the last following Helen Dreiser's death. Gifts and purchases have enriched Penn's Dreiser collection, including the Papers, to such an extent that little of significance regarding Dreiser's life and work is unavailable to the researcher working at Penn.

It is no accident that the University of Pennsylvania became the home for Theodore Dreiser's papers. Historically, the study of American literature was undervalued by English literature departments, which often exhibited a provincial subservience to English letters.[1] At the University of Pennsylvania, however, pioneers like Arthur Hobson Quinn began teaching courses in the American novel in 1912 and in American drama in 1917. Dr. Quinn believed that one reason for the neglect of American writing in colleges was that "the literature had been approached as though it were in a vacuum, divorced from unique historical and economic conditions which had produced it."[2] Emphasizing the necessity for an historical approach to the subject, he was instrumental in the adoption in 1939 of a curriculum in American studies by the graduate school of the University of Pennsylvania and in 1942 by the undergraduate school.

Other Penn faculty, such as E. Sculley Bradley and Robert Spiller, shared Dr. Quinn's devotion to and assessment of American studies. They actively sought to acquire the research materials that they deemed essential to an historical approach. In the late 1930s, Robert Elias, a graduate student in the English Department at Penn, sought out Dreiser in order to use Dreiser's papers for his doctoral dissertation. Penn faculty then approached Dreiser about depositing his collection with the University. Dreiser was aware of his place in the evolution of American literature and of the value of his papers to scholars and collectors. His first literary bequest was the manuscript of Sister Carrie, which was a gift to his frien d H. L. Mencken. Dreiser and Mencken often discussed the final disposition of their papers and agreed that settling on one institution for an entire collection was better than dividing it among several.

Unfortunately, during periods of financial insecurity throughout his lifetime, Dreiser offered various pieces of his literary legacy to collectors or auctioneers in return for ready cash. Some of the manuscripts that were sold have found their way back to his own collection at Penn through donations or purchases, but writings not accounted for here or in other collections are presumed to be in private hands or lost. It is unlikely that Dreiser himself destroyed them, although others close to him may have done so to protect their privacy. He blamed his first wife, Sara White Dreiser, for the destruction of the first manuscript of The "Genius" and it is known that she and her relatives destroyed some of his letters to her and bowdlerized others that are held by the University of Indiana.

Although the University of Pennsylvania has the largest and most comprehensive collection of Dreiser's papers, there are some gaps in its coverage. Over the years, Penn has acquired photocopies and microfilms of some holdings from other collections, w hich are mentioned either in the container list or in an appendix. A study of the series description and the container list confirms that, with few exceptions, even those writing projects for which gaps exist are represented by enough material to give the researcher a sense of Dreiser's plan for the work and its evolution as he worked it out from manuscript to publication. An annotated list of institutions with significant holdings on Dreiser can be found in Theodore Dreiser: A Primary Bibliography and Reference Guide (2nd ed.), by Donald Pizer, Richard W. Dowell, and Frederic E. Rusch (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1991).

Dreiser was a prolific writer and correspondent and one who saved almost everything he wrote, from the initial notes for a piece of writing to the discarded pages from revised manuscripts. In addition to preserving his manuscripts, Dreiser saved incom ing personal and business correspondence and made carbons of outgoing correspondence, especially after he began to have regular secretarial help in the 1920s. He was a compulsive rewriter of his own work and enlisted the aid of friends, associates, and p rofessional editors in the work of revision. After a manuscript was transformed into a typescript, carbons of it were often circulated among his associates for their editorial suggestions. Many of these copies, in addition to the drafts Dreiser revised himself, are housed in this collection, so it is possible to determine some of the influences on Dreiser's work and to better understand the way Dreiser carried out the process of writing.

Correspondence is arranged alphabetically by correspondent and then chronologically within each correspondent's file. Items of incoming and outgoing correspondence are interfiled. Care should be taken by researchers not to remove or misplace the white interleaving sheets found in many folders; this paper is acting as a barrier to keep carbons of outgoing correspondence from acid-staining original letters housed next to them.

Unidentified correspondence is housed immediately after the alphabetical correspondence files. Following the "Unidentified Correspondence" are two additional series of correspondence, one entitled "Miscellaneous Correspondence," the other "Legal Matters.""Miscellaneous Correspondence" comprises two case files, one of materials relating to or collected by Estelle Kubitz Williams, the other of correspondence relating to exhibitions or the collecting of Dreiser's works by the Los Angeles Public Library . "Legal Matters" consists of six distinct files pertaining to various legal matters involving Dreiser. The governing criteria for separating correspondence from the alphabetical correspondence file was whether the material in a file was collected primarily by Theodore or Helen Dreiser or by someone else. This rule explains why two other series, entitled "Paul Dresser Materials" and "Vera Dreiser Correspondence" have been separated from the alphabetical correspondence files and housed later in the coll ection under the general title "Family Members." (It should be noted that, while "Paul Dresser Materials" contains a large addition of materials from outside sources, many items in it were indeed collected by Theodore and Helen Dreiser; this file became so large, however, and contained so much material that was not correspondence that the decision was made to separate it from the main body of correspondence.)

In organizing the manuscripts in this collection, consideration was given to Dreiser's habits of writing, his own presumed plan or arrangement of his papers, the scope of Penn's actual holdings, and the needs of researchers. The fact that the bulk of this collection has been at the University of Pennsylvania since the late 1940s and was opened to scholars before being completely processed makes Dreiser's own organizational schema difficult to determine in 1990. It is known that even before his papers were shipped to the University of Pennsylvania they were reordered several times by his wife or assistants. It is also known that during the preliminary sorting at Penn related items that had arrived clipped together were separated, and no record was ke pt of their original arrangement. Over the years users of the collection have rearranged files and papers to suit the purposes of their own research and have neglected to restore what they moved to its original order. Most unfortunately, some papers that arrived with the collection in the 1940s have disappeared.

How did Dreiser's habits of research and writing influence the final arrangement of the papers? It is important to remember that he was an extremely productive writer in many genres: novels, essays, short stories, poetry, play scripts, and screenplay s. Because his funds were often low, he wanted to recycle his publications so that they generated more than one income. For example, he wrote novel-length works but hoped to sell to the periodicals short pieces adapted from these longer works and thus t o collect a book royalty as well as a payment for the extracted piece. He followed this process in reverse: manuscripts originally sold and published as essays, poems, or short stories were often combined later and sold as book-length units. Some books , such as An American Tragedy, were adapted into play scripts and motion picture screenplays and thus could be marketed again. How to order these related writings both to preserve their integrity as particular genres and to show their relationship to one another was an important consideration in processing Dreiser's papers.

Because many of Dreiser's essays, short stories, poems, and play scripts were published both individually in periodicals and later as parts of collections of similar works, they could have been filed with others of the same genre or collected under the book title Dreiser eventually chose for them. Researchers should check the container list under TD Writings: Books and the appendices for other relevant genres because sometimes a piece of writing, or versions of it, will be found in both locations. For example, the stories that comprise Free and Other Stories and Chains are filed alphabetically in TD Writings: Short Stories because the University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Papers lacks the "book manuscript" for these stories that is known to have existed at one time. By contrast, Penn does have manuscripts, typescripts, and typesetting copy for the studies that were published in A Gallery of Women, and Dreiser's lists and correspondence indicate that he wanted these studies to be published as a unit even though he published some of them first in periodicals. Thus, the researcher will find some of these essays in two places: tearsheets from the periodical publication of the essay filed alphabetically in TD Writings: Essays and manuscripts and typescript s of the essays labeled by Dreiser A Gallery of Women housed under that title in TD Writings: Books.

In addition to recycling published works into other publications, Dreiser sometimes used the same title for writings in two different genres. For example, an essay and a short story are both entitled "Kismet"; "The Factory" is the title for both an es say and a poem; "Credo" is an essay but "The Credo" is a short story; three poems bear the title "Love" and two "Life." Using the same story line, Dreiser wrote a playscript and a screenplay called "The Choice." He wrote a playscript "Solution" based on his short story of the same title. The appendices for all the genres should be consulted for titles so that the researcher does not overlook any relevant adaptations.

The autobiographical character of much of Dreiser's writing occasionally makes the distinction between an essay and a short story a problematic one. Unless Dreiser specified directly, his intent is impossible to recover at this point because the polic y followed for distinguishing between the two when the collection underwent its preliminary sorting in the 1940s is unknown. With the exception of a few obvious misfilings, the stories and essays have been left in their pre-1990 processing genre. Resear chers should check both TD Writings: Essays and TD Writings: Short Stories for titles.

Dreiser's work habits and filing practices also meant that some flexibility was required in defining authorship of the papers in this collection. Sometimes Dreiser developed an idea or a theme for a series of articles, whereupon he would contact lesser-known writers and ask them to compose essays on this theme, with the understanding that he would edit and perhaps rewrite the essays and have the series published under his name. Occasionally the original writer of these pieces cannot be determined bec ause Dreiser had the essay retyped under his name before submitting it to a publisher. Because Dreiser was the author of the idea for the series, as well as the author of one or more of the essays, all manuscripts in the series are housed in TD Writings: Essays under the name of the series, with the name of the actual author of the essay (if known) noted on the folder. The same policy was followed for other works inspired by Dreiser's ideas or writing s.

Dreiser's own identifying terminology is used to describe the contents of a folder unless it is clearly incorrect. Most of the manuscript material from the Dreisers was wrapped in brown paper or manila envelopes with a notation by Dreiser or Helen Dre iser describing the contents. Unfortunately, when the papers arrived at Penn and were rehoused in the preliminary sort, some sources of identification were not documented on the folders. Sources of identification that are questionable for any reason are so indicated on the folders. If the item was not identified originally or was identified incorrectly, a descriptive term has been supplied.

In processing the Theodore Dreiser Papers, extensive use was made of the biographies Dreiser (1965), by W. A. Swanberg, and the two-volume study Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907 (1986) and Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945 (1990), by Richard Lingeman; the biographical study Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free (1932), by Dorothy Dudley; the memoirs My Life with Dreiser, by Helen Dreiser (1951), Theodore Dreiser: A New Dimension, by Marguerite Tjader (1965), and My Uncle Theodore, by Vera Dreiser with Brett Howard (1976); the collections Letters of Theodore Dreiser: A Selection (3 vols.), edited by Robert H. Elias (1959), Dreiser-Mencken Letters: The Correspondence of Theodore Dreiser & H. L. Mencken 1907-1945 (2 vols.), edited by Thomas P. Riggio (1986), and Theodore Dreiser: American Diaries 1902-1926, edited by Thomas P. Riggio (1982); and the reference work Theodore Dreiser: A Primary Bibliography and Reference Guide (2nd ed.), by Donald Pizer, Richard W. Dowell, and Frederic E. Rusch (1991). The last-mentioned work comprises not only a primary bibliography of the works of Theodore Dreiser, but also an annotated bibliography of writings about Dreiser from 1900 to 1989.

Endnotes

[1] In American Literature and the Academy Kermit Vanderbilt reviews in depth "the embattled campaign to build respect for America's authors and create standards of excellence in the study and teaching of our own literature." His book was published in 1986 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

[2] Neda M. Westlake, "Arthur Hobson Quinn, Son of Pennsylvania," The University of Mississippi Studies in English, Volume 3, 1982, p. 15.