Dorothy Dudley's Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free

There are two significant reasons for undertaking a historical and critical examination of Dorothy Dudley's 1932 biography Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free. (The work is also frequently cited as Dreiser and the Land of the Free, the title of its 1946 reissue, and Dudley is occasionally cited as Dorothy Dudley Harvey, her married name.) The book is important as the first substantial biography of Dreiser, one undertaken with his cooperation and that of many of his friends and one containing as well much direct quotation from Dreiser on a wide variety of subjects. Since every Dreiser biographer since 1932 has mined Dudley's biography for material not available elsewhere,¹ it behooves us to know more about her method in the work. In addition, the book is a valuable example of a distinctive moment in American literary biography. As its ironic subtitle suggests, Dudley was seeking not only to write an account of a writer's life but also to describe in detail the adversarial role of the culture in which that life functioned. As she noted in an aside at the close of the work, she was attempting "not merely a biography, but the analysis of the relationship of a remarkable figure to his country and his time" (463). And as in much 1920s literary biography following the explosive impact of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians in 1918, Dudley used biography both to indict the society in which her subject flourished and to have her own presence, both as prose stylist and as personality, play a major role in this effort.

Since Forgotten Frontiers is the only work by Dudley to receive attention, little is known of her life beyond its bare outlines.² She was born in 1884 in Chicago, where her father was a well-to-do physician and her family was socially prominent. She was graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1905, and for several years lived in Chicago and wrote poetry, some of which was published in Poetry after its 1912 founding. In the fall of 1916, armed with an introduction by Edgar Lee Masters, she met Dreiser in New York. They corresponded and saw each other occasionally (both were living in the city), and in 1918 Dreiser enlisted her aid in revising some of the material he intended to include in Twelve Men. Since Dreiser began his relationship with Helen Richardson in 1919 and soon after moved with her to Los Angeles for three years, and since Dudley moved to Paris in 1925, their friendship lapsed until the late 1920s, when both were again in New York. In late 1928, Dudley proposed to Dreiser that she write his biography, and he agreed to support the effort by providing material and making himself accessible for interviews.³ The work went slowly, however, because of Dudley's difficulty—as Dreiser's first biographer—in acquiring information about him and because of Dreiser's many other interests. Not completed until the summer of 1931, the book was published in 1932 by Harrison Smith, the American branch of the London publisher Jonathan Cape. (Smith went bankrupt soon after publication, and though both Dreiser and Dudley sought to find another outlet, it was not until 1946, not long after Dreiser's death, that it was reissued by the Beechhurst Press of New York with a new preface by Dudley.) Dudley and Dreiser continued to correspond and to see each other occasionally for the remainder of his life. She spent many years in France, where she published several translations and wrote frequently about French art. She died in France in 1962.

There is some question about whether Dreiser and Dudley were lovers during 1916-19.⁴ On the one hand, their relationship has the basic configuration of many of his affairs. She was an admirer of his writing, and (as their correspondence of the period reveals) they exchanged work-in-progress and compliments, he sometimes enlisting her aid in editing his manuscripts. On the other hand, Dudley had married the advertising executive Henry Blodgett Harvey before moving to...