Theodore Dreiser

Dawn Softcover, 632 pages ISBN: 1-57423-073-5 1998 $18.95 Hardcover, 632 pages ISBN: 1-57423-074-3 $31.95   Newspaper Days  Softcover, 784 pages ISBN: 1-57432-138-3 2000 $20.95 Hardcover, 784 pages ISBN: 1-57432-139-1 $36.95 Dawn & Newspaper Days the autobiography of Theodore Dreiser edited by T. D. Nostwich In the 1910s, in early middle age, Theodore Dreiser, already America’s great gritty realist, began to take stock of his crowded, complicated life and of the persons and forces that had shaped it. He embarked upon a multi-volume work he planned to call “A History of Myself,” a brutally honest untangling of “the net of flesh and emotion and human relationship into which I was born and which conditioned my early efforts at living.” By 1916 he had completed the first volume, Dawn, a chronicle of his poor Midwestern boyhood and a book so candid and sexually explicit that, out of respect for his family’s feelings, he delayed its publication for fifteen years. In 1922, he finished the second, Newspaper Days, the story of his literary apprenticeship in the roughneck world of big-city dailies. Together they constitute one of the great American autobiographies, less known perhaps than those of Henry Adams and Ulysses S. Grant but in every way worthy of the same short shelf. This Black Sparrow edition, introduced and annotated by Dreiser scholar T. D. Nostwich, is definitive. About Dawn: An Autobiography of Early Youth Published in 1931, just as the country was entering the darkest days of the Great Depression, Dawn is a major American writer’s engrossing effort to understand how he had become the person that he was. It opens in a small house on a dingy street in Terre Haute, Indiana, where the author is born, the ninth of ten children, on August 27, 1871. Central to Dreiser’s story is his Czech mother’s struggle to keep her family together in the face of chronic poverty and her husband’s inability to earn a living. She is all-enduring and all-forgiving, one of Dreiser’s triumphs of characterization. The father, a disabled German Catholic millworker, is pitiful, luckless, and powerless to impress his moral authority on his indifferent children, all of whom are magnetized by pleasure and material display. They are the musically talented Paul, a simple-hearted, generous sensualist; the sullen Rome, an amoral wanderer, often in jail, always full of drink and braggadocio; the four sisters, looking only for fun, finery, and handsome moneyed young men; and Theodore, sickly, withdrawn, finding beauty in nature and in books but little solace from his inborn fatalism. As Professor Nostwich comments, “The conclusions Dreiser drew about the insignificance of his and all human existence goes against the grain of Christian and American optimism but does not alter the fact that Dawn is a uniquely American book. It is the fullest, truest account we have of what it was like to grow up poor in the American Midwest in the late nineteenth century, an age of unsettling social and moral change. It is the story of an idling but insatiably curious, sensuous, and sensual youth’s effort to know himself and find his place in a rigidly moralistic and rampantly materialistic society, one that prized the go-getter but had little use for the dreamer.” About Newspaper Days: An Autobiography During Christmas 1891, Dreiser, age twenty-one and miserable as a bill collector in Chicago, decided to find a job as a reporter: “I conceived of newspapers as wonderlands in which all concerned were prosperous and happy. . . . I was also determined to shake off the garments of the commonplace in which I seemed swathed and step forth into the public arena, where I could be seen and understood for what I was—a writer." He at last found a slot at the Chicago Daily Globe, helping cover the 1892 Democratic National Convention. This, in turn, led to jobs with newspapers in St. Louis, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh—a scraping, unremunerative, eight-year journey through bustling railroad towns, with New York and Pulitzer’s World the final terminal. He started as a reporter, but found greater success as a feature writer, where he was better able to bend fact toward fiction. He specialized in lowlife stories, the research for which was a working education in the brutalities of life: “The police courts, the jails, the houses of ill repute, trade failures and trickery—it was all a grand magnificent spectacle," a pageant of human weakness, wickedness, and survival through cunning and courage. "Everywhere I looked I found a terrifying desire for lust or pleasure or wealth, accompanied by a heartlessness which was freezing to the soul, or a dogged resignation to deprivation and misery." He covered lynchings, streetcar strikes, robberies and murders—all of it testing his abilities as an observer and awakening the novelist within. It was the school that would prepare him for Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), and An American Tragedy (1925). First published in 1922 in what the editor calls an “expurgated abridgment,” Newspaper Days is here published in an edition based on Dreiser’s original typescript.     Softcover, 410 pages ISBN: 0-87685-881-7 1992, $18.95   Fulfilment and Other Tales of Men & Women by Theodore Dreiser Edited, with an introduction & notes, by T. D. Nostwich Sherwood Anderson, commenting on Dreiser's short stories, said that "if there is a modern movement in American prose writing, a movement toward greater courage and fidelity to life, then Theodore Dreiser is the pioneer and the hero of that movement." For this collection, noted Dreiser scholar T. D. Nostwich has chosen the thirteen tales that he considers Dreiser's best. If a common theme unites these stories, says Nostwich, it is that “all the characters share an intense hunger for life and for the fulfilment of the promises, however humble, that life seems to hold out." Seems is the telling word here, for in the fiction of Dreiser, "promises are in most cases mere illusions, circumstances are greater than personalities, and the impotence of human wishes is the tragedy of everyday life." These stories were originally published between 1918 and 1934. Twelve are drawn from Dreiser’s collections Free (1918), Twelve Men (1919), Chains (1927), and A Gallery of Women (1929). The remaining story, “Mathewson,” was published in Esquire in 1934 and is reprinted here for the first time. All have been scrupulously edited by Professor Nostwich, and some are supplemented by previously unpublished passages drawn from the original typescripts in the Dreiser Collection of the University of Pennsylvania. Contents Rella (1929) Peter (1919) Reina (1929) “Vanity, Vanity,” Saith the Preacher (1919) Fulfilment (1927) Mathewson (1934) The “Mercy” of God (1927) Ida Hauchawout (1929) Chains (1927) The Second Choice (1918) Sanctuary (1927) Bridget Mullanphy (1929) Muldoon, the Solid Man (1919)