In October 1910 Theodore Dreiser decided, for the third time in his life, to make a try at professional authorship. He had already attempted full-time writing twice, once as a newspaper reporter from 1892 to 1895 and a second time as a freelance magazine writer from 1897 to 1900. Both times Dreiser had found it necessary to abandon authorship and move into magazine editing in order to support himself. Now, in the fall of 1910, he meant to try authorship again - this time as a writer of fiction.

Dreiser had no immediate reason to change occupations. He was well established as the editor of several large-circulation magazines issued by Butterick Publications and was married, rather conventionally, to a pleasant and affectionate woman. He had recently turned thirty-nine, had money in the bank, and was living in a comfortable flat in New York City. It is true that he had become entangled in an office romance with a woman too young for him, but he could probably have smoothed over that matter and continued to work at Butterick if he had wished to. He could also have left Butterick and sought editorial work elsewhere in the city. Instead he chose to resign from his post and begin writing fiction for a living. From a practical point of view his decision is hard to explain; sitting on his side of the desk, the editor’s side, he must have been reminded frequently of how precarious the lot of the professional author could be. Many of the scribblers with whom he dealt at Butterick were undoubtedly living from hand to mouth, angling for the next writing assignment or book advance, occasionally enjoying fat periods when money arrived but more often subsisting on short funds. Why should Dreiser choose such a life?

Despite a remarkable decline from middle-class respectability to ignominious death in a Bowery flop house, George Hurstwood represents something of a typical figure in the twentieth-century American novel. With the character of Hurstwood, Theodore Dreiser identified white middle-class male experience with profound spiritual alienation and located the source of its problems not in the conventional places of metropolitan modernity - the street, the department store, the hotel - but rather within the putative bastion against the destabilizing forces of modernity: the home. Sister Carrie anticipates an important but neglected tradition of domestic writing by and about men, in which the affluent house owner is understood to possess a material shelter but to lack a proper spiritual refuge; he is, in other words, effectively “homeless.” In contrast with the representations of nineteenth-century domestic alienation explored by feminist literary scholars such as Nina Baym and Lora Romero, in which masculine identity is understood to depend on the rejection of the woman-centered domestic ideal, their twentieth-century counterparts highlight the sense of loss that accompanies the failure of this ideal for the middle class.

When Theodore Dreiser wrote a sketch about “Christmas in the Tenements” (1902), he might have written about the persistence, despite the poverty, of family ritual or religious sentiment. He might have described the simple pleasures of a holiday. But he wrote instead about the longing for things. The sketch exhibits a “wealth of feeling and desire,” but both are expressed “through the thinnest and most meager material forms.”

The sketch became the penultimate chapter of The Color of a Great City (1926), a collection of articles written before World War I, before the “splendor” of the “new-world metropolis” had been considerably tamed (vii). That splendor - Manhattan’s “color”- derived from its diversity, the “meaner” regions of the Bowery and East Broadway, the ethnic neighborhoods, the “maidens in orange and green skirts” in Little Italy, for instance, “with a wealth of black hair fluffed back from their foreheads, and yellow shawls and coral necklaces fastened about their necks” (268). By the 1890s, in fact, the “color” of America’s great cities had become almost as marketable as the “local color” of rural America, which flooded the popular monthlies. For Dreiser, the “local life” that Eugene Field had written about in Chicago’s Daily News “moved [him[ as nothing hitherto had.”

In his brief but resonant introduction to Sister Carrie, novelist E. L. Doctorow pauses to note that the young Dreiser arrived in Pittsburgh in “the aftermath of the Homestead strike in which armies of Pinkerton detectives and striking steelworkers had fought pitched battles.” The remark raises an interesting question about a scene in The Financier when there is another mention of the Pinkertons. Edward Malia Butler, who has been informed that his daughter Aileen is carrying on an illicit relationship with Frank Cowperwood, reluctantly decides to go to a detective. Seeking one not in Philadelphia but in New York, where he can pass unknown, he nevertheless hesitates to give his name at the Pinkerton office or “to take anyone into his confidence in regard to Aileen” (35). It’s not hard to see why. In practical terms, all the major players in this novel, Butler included, subscribe to Frank Cowperwood’s motto, “I satisfy myself.”And in a world of self-satisfiers, why should anyone have confidence in anyone else, confidence in other words that others will do anything other than satisfy the urge to make as large a profit as possible, if necessary at one’s expense?

In November 1913, Dreiser wrote his friend and literary champion, H. L. Mencken, “After I am dead please take up the mss of The Financier, Titan and Travel book and restore some of the woman stuff.” It may come as a surprise that considerable “woman stuff” was eliminated from The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), from A Traveler at Forty (1913), and indeed from many of Dreiser’s other works, for women do not exactly flicker in the sidelights of his writing. As heroines, lovers, and antagonists, they frequently share center stage, often even crowding out their male counterparts. Notably, two of his novels, Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911), take their titles from the names of female characters, while none display the proper names of men.

Now that a century’s discussion has passed, a trajectory has started to become evident in readers’ reactions to Dreiser’s portrayal of women. Until recently, two responses predominated. Those who disliked his writing frequently saw Dreiser’s non-judgmental treatment of “fallen women” as proof of his literary and/or moral ineptitude. Those who admired his books would often, to the contrary, laud his open treatment of sexuality and evident sympathy for women as an important aspect of his crusade against restrictive American “puritanism.” When the tide of feminist criticism beginning in the 1960s and 1970s began to crest on Dreiser, the discussion shifted, and an area of increasing concern became the extent of his investment in gender stereotypes. This question is complicated by the fact that, as Donald Pizer observes, most of Dreiser’s plots derive from popular literature - which itself can draw heavily from gender stereotypes. While some recent accounts depict Dreiser as challenging conventional views of women, many conclude that he is, in the words of one author, “Hell on Women.” In particular, examinations of Dreiser’s treatment of female sexuality often reach negative and even censorious conclusions.

“Dreiser more than any other man, marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life. Without his pioneering, I doubt if any of us could, unless we liked to be sent to jail, seek to express life and beauty and terror.” The speaker of these words was Sinclair Lewis, on the occasion of becoming the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Lewis spoke for a generation of writers when he lauded Dreiser for sweeping aside old models and providing American literature’s “first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman.” In acknowledging Dreiser’s leadership, Lewis gave voice to a widespread feeling in the American literary community: that Dreiser was the one who should have won the prize.

Dreiser’s recognition as America’s leading novelist during the period preceding World War II marked the apex of a circuitous lifetime odyssey that saw him move from anonymity to notoriety to triumph. His work went briefly into eclipse after his death during the heyday of the New Criticism (which privileged modernist experimentation and looked down on Dreiser’s straightforward storytelling). With historically oriented approaches to literature regaining ground in the past generation, Dreiser has risen once again to a central position in the American canon. Ironically, years after his death, Dreiser is now getting what he always wanted: a uniform edition of his work, an enterprise sponsored by two university presses. His fiction has become a staple of the American literary curriculum. In short, his importance is now assured.

When Theodore Dreiser was finishing An American Tragedy in 1925, he found himself unsatisfied with the scene of Clyde’s execution at the end of the novel. In search of the specificity that fuels all of his writing, he sought to observe an actual death row at Ossining (“Sing-Sing”) State Prison in New York. The visit, brokered by his friend and supporter H. L. Mencken, was arranged by none other than James M. Cain, then a writer at the New York World. A few years later, Cain would turn from journalism to fiction, just as Dreiser had done a quarter of a century earlier. Cain’s first two novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936), were stories of planned murder for love and money, and they shocked the literary community with their frank portrayals of greed, lust, and depravity. Like Dreiser - whose earlier novels had been attacked by such organizations as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice - Cain found himself the object of a moralistic crusade to have his writing banned. And like Dreiser’s writing, instead of being suppressed, Cain’s work became influential. His novels continue to be read; today Cain is recognized as one of the founders of the hard-boiled school of crime fiction, a genre which features self-interested, emotionally hardened loners who navigate a morally degraded world.

Like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain before him, Dreiser has been read as a deeply autobiographical writer. We know, for instance, what Donald Pizer means by saying that Dreiser is “not only Jeff and Davies [in 'Nigger Jeff'[ but will also be Carrie and Hurstwood, Jennie and Lester, Clyde and Roberta, and Steward and Solon.” Yet these same characters can also be attributed to Dreiser’s penchant for writing stories about people utterly unlike himself. A short list of originals for his major characters would include his rebellious sisters, murderers, painters, financiers, show girls, his mistresses (and their relatives), prominent Quakers, ministers, politicians, his parents, and many a New Woman of his day. His interest in them is a product of a novelist’s natural curiosity about the men and women who inhabit his world. But in Dreiser’s case there is also evidence of a strong attraction to formal biography. His writing recurrently makes use of biographical genres, from the lowly interview to more elaborate popular texts, including the criminal biography, the biography of the businessman, and the historical novel.

Dreiser’s impulse to write concurrently in memoirs and in biographical forms sprang from his view of himself as both a chronicler and a representative figure of his era. He shared this trait with contemporaries as different as Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Edward Bok, whose desire to break down the division between autobiography and biography led them to write about themselves in the third person. Dreiser was less technically experimental, but he resembled them in blurring the distinctions between the two types of writing. He gave high marks to the “absolutely vital, unillusioned biography such as that of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions [and[ Cellini’s Diary” and claimed them as models for his own work.

Although the question of Dreiser’s style is a complex one, involving considerations of ethnicity as well as aesthetics, to critics of the Cold War generation the very notion of analyzing Dreiser’s formal skills appeared a flat contradiction in terms. Lionel Trilling’s famous discussion of Dreiser in The Liberal Imagination (1950), where he declared that Dreiser “writes badly”and “thinks stupidly,” set the tone within the post-war American academy for the institutionalization of Henry James as a writer of the highest artistic “quality”and the downgrading of Dreiser as a sympathizer with the Communist Party who lacked “flexibility of mind.” Trilling charged Dreiser not only with “vulgar materialism” and a “doctrinaire anti-Semitism,” but also, when he did address the question of style, with a tendency toward “bookishness.” In phrases such as “a scene more distingué than this,”argued Trilling, Dreiser’s style is “precisely literary in the bad sense; he is full of flowers of rhetoric and shines with paste gems.”

In his view of Dreiser’s rhetorical inauthenticity, Trilling was explicitly taking exception to what he described as F. O. Matthiessen’s acquiescence in “the liberal cliché which opposes crude experience to mind.” Dreiser had been the subject of Matthiessen’s last book, published posthumously in 1951, which, in its portrayal of Dreiser as a forerunner of Popular Front socialism, can be understood as the final installment of Matthiessen’s effort, begun in American Renaissance (1941), to align American literary culture with a progressive, communitarian spirit.

In July 1893, as a correspondent for the St. Louis Republic, Theodore Dreiser accompanied a group of young female schoolteachers to the World’s Columbian Exposition. Commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, the Exposition, or World’s Fair, was held on a 686-acre site in Jackson Park, seven miles south of downtown Chicago, between May and October 1893. Visited by around twenty million people, it served to express dominant ideas about American and global cultures. Exhibits were divided into two separate sections: the White City, a collection of neoclassically fronted buildings containing the “best” of contemporary art and technology, displayed an official version of “progress” and the limitless possibilities for material and spiritual improvement opened up by the emergence of the United States as a world power. The Midway Plaisance, a mile-long strip that led up to White City, combined popular amusements, such as the Ferris wheel, with ethnological displays of other, explicitly “primitive,” cultures.

Dreiser was fulsome in his praise for what he witnessed in the official section of the Fair. He enthused:

In 1906, the year before Theodore Dreiser reissued Sister Carrie, the American Journal of Sociology published University of Chicago sociologist W. I. Thomas’s “The Adventitious Character of Woman.” In the essay, Thomas contends that woman was originally dominant but gradually “dropped back into a somewhat unstable and adventitious relation to the social process” (32). In his effort to understand this evolution, he explains that modern women - especially American women - have become dependent on their communities for regulation. Noting that “an unattached woman has a tendency to become an adventuress - not so much on economic as on psychological grounds” (41), he contends that when “the ordinary girl … becomes detached from home and group, and is removed not only from surveillance, but from the ordinary stimulation and interest afforded by social life and acquaintanceship, her inhibitions are likely to be relaxed” (41-42).

To many commentators of the early twentieth century, American culture seemed to have divided between, roughly speaking, the high and the low - between the high arts and popular culture, between spiritual values and materialistic ambitions, between the world of art and the world of business. Accepting for the moment this formulation, we could say that few modern writers lived as deeply in both realms as Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser was, to begin with, intimately connected with the art scene in New York City, having written many feature articles on leading artists during the 1890s, based on his visits to their studios. Yet in the next decade, following the publication of Sister Carrie (and its disappointing promotion and sales), Dreiser worked with great success in the publishing business, rising eventually to direct three popular women’s magazines for the Butterick Publishing Company. The two worlds of art and commerce came together in Dreiser, and they come together, from different directions, in the personalities of two major heroes in the fiction written after 1910: Frank Cowperwood (The Financier, The Titan, The Stoic), imperious as both a businessman and as an art collector; and Eugene Witla (The “Genius”), an immensely gifted artist who becomes editorial director for a major publisher.

La Nouvelle-France (1534–1760)

One of the undeniable pleasures of reading the francophone writing of Canada as a historical project is to observe how it takes shape. Although it is produced for the most part in Quebec, in its initial phase it was published in France. A printing press was not established in Quebec until 1764 when the first periodical, La Gazette de Québec/The Quebec Gazette, appeared. The point of departure for subsequent writing in French is New France, which included what are now known as the regions of Acadia and Franco-Ontario. Subsequent writing from the Prairies did not appear until the nineteenth century. It also includes Aboriginal writing, which holds a distinct, if often neglected, place. Although critics of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries consider francophone writing to be a literature of resistance, the cultures resisted are not always the same, inasmuch as French Canada would variously oppose Great Britain and France, and often the differing ideologies and regions of French Canada itself would be in opposition.

Introduction

In May 1951 Robert Weaver, the person in charge of literary programming for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's national radio network, bought broadcast rights for a short story called “The Strangers.” It had been written by a nineteen-year-old university student named Alice Laidlaw. After Laidlaw made some revisions, Weaver planned to broadcast it on 1 June on Canadian Short Stories, a fifteen-minute national program. But on 30 May he wired Laidlaw that “The Strangers” would not be broadcast as planned because the Massey Commission Report was to be released on the afternoon of 1 June; the story was broadcast later that year.

Though anecdotal, this coincidental moment is an apt point of departure for a discussion of the Canadian short story in English. Throughout his long career at the CBC from 1948 through 1985, through a succession of programs the most prominent of which was Anthology (1953–85), Robert Weaver encouraged scores of writers to develop the form in Canada. More than this, with William Toye and others, he produced the Tamarack Review (1956–82), the leading Canadian literary magazine of its tumultuous times, and also edited a succession of influential short-story anthologies beginning with Canadian Short Stories (1960) through a Fifth Series volume in 1991. Alice Laidlaw, the young writer from whom Weaver bought “The Strangers” – the first story she had ever sold – went on to marry in 1951 and become Alice Munro; throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, times of struggle and frustration for Munro as a writer, Weaver would remain her primary connection to a literary world.

A land without poetry

In The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood (1939-) reimagines Susanna Moodie, the nineteenth-century poet and novelist, who enters the “large darkness” that is Canada and fashions her life as a reluctant pioneer. Atwood's Moodie finds herself “a word / in a foreign language,” an apt description of someone alien in her new environment and cut off irretrievably from her old environment of England. As she confronts her new home, she meets what she sees as an uncultured landscape awaiting transformation into a cultured world.

For the real Mrs. Moodie, who arrived from England in 1832, Canada was first and foremost a land without poetry. It was not until more than thirty years later that Edward Hartley Dewart (1828–1903) would publish the first anthology of Canadian poetry, Selections from Canadian Poets (1864), designed to “rescue from oblivion some of the floating pieces of Canadian authorship worthy of preservation in a more permanent form.” Casting a wide net that included most of the recognized poets of the period, including Susanna Moodie, he proclaimed that poets should be national heroes, though they would probably go unrecognized in such a young country as Canada: “if a Milton or a Shakspere . . . was to arise among us, it is far from certain that his merit would be recognized.” Canadians, he asserted, must be aware of the vitality and the significance of the poetic mind.