“A Symposium: Will Fascism Come to America?”
Modern Monthly
Vol. VIII
September 1934
pp. 453-478
Dreiser was one of the contributors.
‘will fascism come to America’ – Modern Monthly, September 1934
Theodore Dreiser, ‘Will Fascism Come to America’ – Modern Monthly
— posted by Roger W. Smith
January 2023
During the year 1890 I had been formulating my first dim notion as to what it was I wanted to do in life. For two years and more I had’ been reading Eugene Field’s “Sharps and Flats,” a column he wrote daily for the Chicago Daily News, and through this, the various phases of life which he suggested in a humorous though at times romantic way, I was beginning to suspect, vaguely at first, that I wanted to write, possibly something like that. Nothing else that I had so far read-novels, plays, poems, histories-gave me quite the same feeling for constructive thought as did the matter of his daily notes, poems, and aphorisms, which were of Chicago principally, whereas nearly all others dealt with foreign scenes and people.
— Theodore Dreiser, A Book About Myself
Everything Field wrote in prose or verse reflects his contempt for earth’s mighty and his sympathy for earth’s million mites. His art, like that of his favorite author and prototype, Father Prout, was “to magnify what is little and fling a dash of the sublime into a two-penny post communication.” Sense of earthly grandeur he had little or none. Sense of the minor sympathies of life-those minor sympathies that are common to all and finally swell into the major song of life-of this sense he was compact. It was the meat and marrow of his life and mind, of his song and story. With unerring instinct Field, in his study of humanity, went to the one school where the emotions, wishes, and passions of mankind are to be seen unobscured by the veil of consciousness. He was forever scanning whatever lies hidden within the folds of the heart of childhood. He knew children through and through because he studied them from themselves and not from books. He associated with them on terms of the most intimate comradeship and wormed his way into their confidence with assiduous sympathy. Thus he became possessed of the inmost secrets of their childish joys and griefs and so became a literary philosopher of childhood.
— Slason Thompson, Eugene Field: A Study in Heredity and Contradictions (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), Volume I, pg. x
— posted by Roger W. Smith
January 2023
Eugene Field
Franklin P. Adams wrote the column “The Conning Tower” in the New York Herald Tribune.
Adams
Herald Tribune, June 23, 1931
Franklin P. Adams (The Conning Tower) – NY Herald Tribune 6-23-1931
Herald Tribune, June 30. 1931
Franklin P. Adams (The Conning Tower) – NY Herald Tribune 6-30-1931
Heywood Broun
New York World-Telegram,
August 1, 1931
Heywood Broun, NY World-Telegram 8-1-1931
— posted by Roger W. Smith
November 2022
The nearest analogy to Dreiser’s “personal” realism is to be found in the painter Edward Hopper, who shares Dreiser’s passion for transcendentalist writers, for images of trains and roads. Despite his similar choice of “ordinary” subjects, Hopper has written that his aim “has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature.” One critic has said that Hopper’s pictures–a silent city street early on a Sunday morning, a Victorian house by a railroad track, an usherette musing in the corridor of a movie theater–are astonishingly poignant “as if they were familiar scenes solemnly witnessed for the very last time.” One feels in the awkwardness, the dreaming stillness of Hopper’s figures the same struggle to express the ultimate confrontation of men and things that one does in Dreiser’s reverent description of saloons, street-cars, trains, hotels, offices. The beauty of such realism, which contrasts with the photographic exactness of a Charles Sheeler, is inevitably allied to a certain pathos. Just as in An American Tragedy one feels about Clyde Griffiths’s exultant discovery of hotel luxury the pitiful distance between the boy and the social world of tawdry prizes that he is trying to win, so in Hopper’s street scenes and lonely offices one can visualize the actual unrelatedness between men and the objects they use every day. It is one of the paradoxes of modem art that the more “external” and ordinary the object portrayed–a city street in Hopper, the complex record of a stock deal in Dreiser–the more personal is the emotion conveyed. The emotion consists in exactly this surprise of attachment to the world that so often dwarfs us. An American Tragedy begins unforgettably with a picture of a small missionary family in a big city, engulfed by the tall walls in its commercial heart; Sister Carrie is stupefied by the immensity of Chicago, and when she asks for work at Speigelheim and Company, is looked over by the foreman “as one would a package”; even Cowperwood, magnetic and powerful as he is, is surrounded by “the endless shift of things,” first in Philadelphia, then in Chicago. But it is the haunting feeling for things that the hero of The ‘Genius,’ a painter, conveys in his pictures of the Chicago River, the muddy industrial stream that significantly moves Witla to a “panegyric on its beauty and littleness, finding the former where few would have believed it to exist.” Later in New York, Eugene does a picture of Greeley Square in a drizzling rain, catching “the exact texture of seeping water on gray stones in the glare of various electric lights. He had caught the values of various kinds of lights, those in cabs, those in cable cars, those in shop windows, those in the street lamp–relieving by them the black shadows of the crowds and of the sky.” This might be a picture by Alfred Stieglitz. Despite the personal vulgarity and tinsel showiness in Dreiser’s style, his fundamental vision of things is always the artist’s.
— Alfred Kazin, General Introduction, The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser (The Laurel Dreiser; New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1959)
Note — The hero of Dreiser’s The “Genius,” Eugene Witla, was modeled on the Ashcan School painter, Everett Shinn. See Joseph J. Kwiat’s article, attached.
Joseph J. Kwiat, ‘Dreiser’s The Genius and Everett Shinn’
painting by Everett Shinn
— posted by Roger W. Smith
November 2022
“Traveling Man,” Time, January 19, 1948, pg. 61
On the walls of a Manhattan gallery last week hung some of the best paintings recently produced in the U.S. In the center of the room towered a high-domed, uncomfortable-looking gentleman, who questioningly pointed out first one of his pictures and then another to a small cluster of admirers. He heard their praises in silence, with an expression of kindly gloom. When the chatter died away, Edward Hopper’s paintings spoke for him, and spoke with concentrated force.
Manhattan’s classy, glassy Museum of Modern Art owns seven of his pictures, but except for his preoccupation with subject matter that is not conventionally beautiful, there was never anything “modern” about Hopper.
For Hopper, “nature” is largely man-made (the glare of electricity and the harsh jumble of U.S. cities and towns fascinates him) and it consists more of what he remembers than of what he sees. His big, cleanly painted canvases look like windows on simplified reality.
No Waiting. Rooms for Tourists was a literal portrait of a house in Provincetown near where he spends his summers. He had parked in front of the house evening after evening, making sketches by the dome light in his car. “Mrs. Hopper thought I should let the landlady know what I was doing out there,” he says, “but I didn’t want to intrude.”
Rooms for Tourists, like most of Hopper’s work, has the strange clarity of something seen once for an instant by a passing driver. It is a familiar vision without any of the dullness familiarity brings. The house looms sharply in the long darkness of the night, and the light shining from its windows is warm as bed. The impression, and the invitation, are instantaneous; the road leads on past.
A road cuts across the foreground of most of Hopper’s paintings. Sometimes it becomes a city street, or a railroad embankment, or a porch step, but it is there–a constant reminder of transience.
Born 65 years ago in Nyack, N.Y., Hopper has been following the painter’s road for nearly half a century. He was lucky enough to study with Robert Henri, whose “Ashcan School” of urban realism neatly fitted his own natural bent, and he later made three trips to Paris (where he imitated the impressionists but made no contact with young moderns like Picasso). For a long time Hopper’s road was a rocky one. He sold only two paintings in 23 years, supported himself by doing commercial illustrations, which he hated. Says Hopper: “I was a rotten illustrator–or mediocre, anyway.”
No Impulse. Hopper did not hit his stride until middle age, when sudden fame as an interpreter of the American scene–a sort of Theodore Dreiser in art–freed him. Nowadays, Hopper and his wife, who keeps her own painting studiously in the background, can afford a house on Cape Cod as well as their Manhattan studio apartment overlooking Washington Square.
“I wish I could paint more,” Hopper says. “I get sick of reading and going to the movies. I’d much rather be painting all the time, but I don’t have the impulse. Of course I do dozens of sketches for oils–just a few lines on yellow typewriter paper–and then I almost always burn them. If I do one that interests me, I go on and make a painting, but that happens only two or three times a year. . . .”
Hopper’s Summer Evening, a young couple talking in the harsh light of a cottage porch, is inescapably romantic, but Hopper was hurt by one critic’s suggestion that it would do for an illustration in “any woman’s magazine.” Hopper had the painting in the back of his head “for 20 years, and I never thought of putting the figures in until I actually started it last summer. Why, any art director would tear the picture apart. The figures were not what interested me; it was the light streaming down, and the night all around.
“. . . To me, the important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you’re traveling.”
— posted by Roger W. Smith
November 2022
FINAL, RUSSIAN Dinamov – Preface to A Gallery of Women
FINAL, ENGLISH Dinamov – Peface to A Gallery of Women
Posted here as Word documents are the original Russian article:
Теодор Драйзер и революция
Предисловие к Теодору Драйзеру: Собрание сочинений, том 8
Москва; Ленинград, 1933 г.
and an English translation by Roger W. Smith:
Theodore Dreiser and Revolution
Preface to Theodore Dreiser: Collected Works, Volume 8
By Sergei Dinamov
Moscow; Leningrad, 1933
Sergei Dinamov was a Russian critic.
See also a copy of the original article below.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
September 2022
Ted Robinson, Jack and Jill parody – Ithaca Journal-News 4-25-1921 pg 4
This parody of Dreiser by Ted Robinson appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (date unknown) and was reprinted in the Ithaca Journal-News of April 25, 1921. It was one of several parodies of Jack and Jill as told by various writers.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
September 2022
‘The Literary Outlook (2)- Los Angeles Tiimes 8-12-1898
‘The Literary Outlook’ – Los Angeles Times 8-12-1898
Posted here, an early, interesting notice of Dreiser:
“The Literary Outlook”
by E. C. Martin
The Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1898, pg. 7
— posted by Roger W. Smith
September 2022
‘Dreiser and the Riddle of the Sphinx’
Posted here (PDF file above):
“Dreiser and the Riddle of the Sphinx”
From the Day’s Journey: A Book of By-Paths and Eddies About St. Louis
By Harry Rosecrans Burke
Saint Louis: The W. H. Miner Co., Inc., 1924
pp. 165-171
In this chapter, there is a rare recounting of Dreiser during his days as a reporter in St. Louis.
Dreiser lived in St. Louis from 1892 to 1894, during which time he was employed as a reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the St. Louis Republic.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
August 2022
Paul Vandervoort, ‘Memories of Dreiser’ – Indianapolis Star 10-2-1976
Posted here (PDF above):
“Memories of Dreiser”
By Paul Vandervoort
The Indianapolis Star
October 2, 1976
The article focuses on recollections of Dreiser’s niece Vera Dreiser, who had just published a book on Dreiser, My Uncle Theodore.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
July 2022
Roger W. Smith's Theodore Dreiser site 