Theodore Dreiser Recalled ed. by Donald Pizer (review)

That a scholar publishes a seminal book at the age of eighty-eight is both rare and remarkable. When the octogenarian turns out to be Donald Pizer, the publication of such a book must be called a major event. Pizer's first article partly devoted to Dreiser came out when this reviewer was merely two years old ("Nineteenth-Century American Naturalism: An Essay in Definition," 1965). His subsequent work on Dreiser fills more than a meter of shelf space, including a monograph, a bibliography, documentary volumes, critical editions of the author's novels, non-fictional writings, letters, and interviews, as well as collections of secondary readings by himself and others—not to mention book-length publications on writers like Stephen Crane, John Dos Passos, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, and Frank Norris, or American realism, naturalism, and modernism in general.

In Theodore Dreiser Recalled, Pizer has gathered recollections by 35 people who knew Dreiser well—mainly lovers (most of them in the triple role of secretaries/editors/lovers), friends (many of whom Dreiser eventually managed to frustrate), and literary and political associates (who provide a mixed picture of the author's personality). Their versions of the past have been excerpted from 54 documents (37 of them reprinted from published sources), dating from between 1905 and 1998, and ranging in genre from auto/biographies, diaries, and interviews to memoirs, personal letters, and literary portraits. The previously unpublished materials "stem from [16] letters written to Robert H. Elias … and W. A. Swanberg … as they were preparing their biographies of Dreiser" (ix) and one Swanberg interview with William C. Lengel, all retrieved from the Theodore Dreiser Collection at Cornell's Kroch Library and the W. A. Swanberg Papers at the University of Pennsylvania Library.

These recollections are presented in two parts—"Personal Life" and "Career and Beliefs"—which have been subdivided into nine sections "representing significant phases of Dreiser's life and work" (x)—[Part One:] "Portraits of Dreiser"; "Relations with Women"; "Homes"; "Final Years"; [Part Two:] "Social and Political Activism"; "Magazine Editor"; "The Craft of Writing"; "Literary Friendships"; and "Relations with Publishers and Movie Producers." Each section is preceded by an "interpretive preface" (x), complemented by copious explanatory notes. Together with ten illustrations, a chronology of Dreiser's life and works, a "Biographical Glossary of Contributors" (which features an entry on Dreiser's first wife, Sara ["Jug"] White, even though she is only portrayed indirectly), a "Contents List in Order of Date of Authorship or Publication," a "Bibliography of Recollections of Dreiser" (also including texts not contained in the volume), and an index, Theodore Dreiser Recalled is a treasure trove of interest to experts and non-experts alike.

Among the collection's greatest assets, especially for readers familiar with the biographies by Dorothy Dudley (1932/46), Robert H. Elias (1949/69), W.A. Swanberg (1965), Richard R. Lingeman (1986 & 1990; abridged 1993), and Jerome Loving (2005), are the wisdom of text selection and editorial judgment; a sense of intensity and immediacy otherwise only encountered in Dreiser's diaries and correspondence; and the equal consideration of Dreiser's life and oeuvre.

In contrast to Dreiser (1965), where incriminating facts are accumulated to depict the author as the psychopath Swanberg believed him to have been—a biography in which, as Kirah Markham fittingly put it in a 13 December 1965 letter, "love [of its subject] is lacking" (26)—Theodore Dreiser Recalled invites us to engage with the full spectrum of Dreiser's contradictory personality. Equity is achieved by including portraits on both sides of the polarizing divide between people who loved or respected Dreiser and those who hated (or changed their opinion about) him. Although some of the author's most spectacular escapades are well known, e.g., his slapping Sinclair Lewis for accusing him of plagiarism (see 236–37) or throwing coffee in the face of Horace Liveright for calling him a liar (see 274–75), this collection...