Theodore Dreiser's Uncollected Magazine Articles, 1897-1902 (review)

With the publication of this volume, Yoshinobu Hakutani gives readers access to all of Theodore Dreiser's freelance magazine writing between 1897 and 1902. In this way, we should consider this volume an addendum to Hakutani's earlier edited collections of Dreiser's writing: Art, Music, and Literature, 1987–1902 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001) and his Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser: Life and Art in the American 1890s, 2 vols. (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985, 1987). In total, these volumes reprint all of Dreiser's magazine writing (111 articles) from November 1897 (two months after he resigned his editorship of Ev'ry Month) to the publication of "Christmas in the Tenements" in Harper's Weekly in December 1902. (Hakutani explains that he includes these articles, even as they are printed after the publication of Sister Carrie, because they were clearly written before the novel was published in November 1900.) Hakutani also includes in this volume a complete bibliographical list of all of Dreiser's magazine publications from 1897 to 1902.

The essays collected here will be of interest to a variety of scholarly constituencies, not merely Dreiser critics and scholars of American periodicals. Because Dreiser's subject matter was so varied, the thirty-four articles included in the book give a splendid snapshot of American magazine publication at the turn of the century. Many of the included articles were published in Success and in Ainslee's, but also included are articles from Demorest's, Cosmopolitan, Pearson's, and Harper's Monthly. Hakutani organizes his selections into five different topical categories: success stories, science and industry, the American landscape, the city, and "other sites and scenes." It is not entirely clear why he chose to do this, since many of the individual essays could be classified under a different rubric and, indeed, the identified categories seem to diminish the wide range of the individual essays. For example, even the most generically predictable of all the articles, which are the biographical interviews with prominent American citizens published in Success, described by Hakutani as having a "monotonous similarity" insofar as Dreiser asks each of his famous men the same questions (sounding very much like Howells's young reporter interviewing Silas Lapham), are in fact more compelling than their grouping under the topical category "success stories" would suggest. Moreover, while there is an essential similarity to the questions that Dreiser asks, it is worth realizing that his "objective" account of each subject varies a good deal. Thus, when he cites the lawyer Joseph H. Choate's insistence that "I never met a great man who was born rich," Dreiser wryly notes, "this remark seemed rather striking . . . because of the fact that Mr.Choate's parents were not poor in the accepted sense" (43). The organizing system also seems strained insofar as it is not entirely clear what explains inclusion or exclusion from different categories—why include the tale about the Connecticut sailor (originally published in Ainslee's) under the section on success, while the essay on the Captain who cares for the indigent of New York (originally published in Success and later worked into Sister Carrie) is grouped under articles about the city?

Despite this quarrel with taxonomy, the book is extraordinarily useful both as anthology and bibliography. As Hakutani notes in his introductory essay, the book gives us splendid access to Dreiser's meditations on the impact of both nature and technology on the developing American landscape. And indeed, of particular interest is Dreiser's writing on the material infrastructure of the nation. The collection includes essays on battleship and small arms manufactories and on the burgeoning fruit industry...