Sidebar
Main Content
"A Strangely Strong Novel in a Queer Milieu" | 
| |
Rare Book & Manuscript Library University of Pennsylvania | ||
 Morris Photograph of Dreiser Pittsburgh, ca. 1894 Taken at the time when Dreiser was shuttling among various city papers from Chicago to St. Louis to Pittsburgh to Toledo | Before publishing his first novel, Dreiser's apprenticeship in writing comprised a
menagerie of short-term assignments and positions with newspapers and magazines from
St. Louis to New York. His first reporter's job came in 1892 with the Chicago
Daily Globe, considered one of the weakest of the Chicago papers at the time.
But the Globe's less-than-premiere status afforded the inexperienced
writer the opportunity to prove himself. He parlayed his few months of work at the
Chicago Daily Globe into a position at the St. Louis
Globe-Democrat, a morning Republican paper that was the biggest in town. At one
point Dreiser was assigned the "hotel beat," which meant interviewing visiting
celebrities. After returning to the city room one night, having just interviewed the
theosophist Annie Besant, he was called away to cover a triple murder. Still dressed
in his rented evening clothes, Dreiser arrived at the scene of the crime to find the
bloody corpses of a mother and her two children who had been brutally murdered by her
husband, the children's father. This dichotomy between wealth and poverty, between
appearance and reality, between prospects and hopelessness informs Sister
Carrie. The life of the newspaperman in Dreiser's time was itself filled with poverty, lasciviousness, and corruption, as were many of the events that a reporter covered. At first naïve, Dreiser quickly learned the ropes and the realities of urban America, but invariably his ideals or vision or personal pride created rifts between himself and management. Freedom--or what appeared to be freedom--to write works to his own plan drove Dreiser not only to seek the editorship at Ev'ry Month but also to pursue creative writing, such as poetry. After departing Ev'ry Month in September 1897, Dreiser wrote scores of articles for all manner of publications, always hoping that he could find a measure of financial freedom to write his first novel. Among these works came material that would latter be incorporated into Sister Carrie, which he began in earnest in the fall of 1899.
| ||||||||||||||||
Table of Contents
