Twelve Men. Theodore Dreiser

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      TWELVE MEN

      The University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition

      Thomas P. Riggio, General Editor

      James L. W. West III, Textual Editor

      Lee Ann Draud, Textual Editor

      A complete list of books in the series

      is available from the publisher.

       TWELVE MEN

      THEODORE DREISER

      Edited by

      ROBERT COLTRANE

       PENN

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia

      Copyright © 1998 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Dreiser, Theodore, 1871-1945

      Twelve men / Theodore Dreiser ; edited by Robert Coltrane.

      p. cm. — (The University of Pennsylvania Dreiser edition)

      Includes bibliographical references

      1. Character sketches. 2. United States—Biography.

      I. Coltrane, Robert. II. Title. III. Series.

      PS3507/R55T9 1998

      920'.073—dc21

      97-48786

      CIP

      CONTENTS

       Illustrations

      Preface by Thomas P. Riggio

       Acknowledgments

       Twelve Men

       Historical Commentary

       The Creation of Twelve Men

       Publication History

       Biographical Sketches

       Illustrations

       Historical Notes

       Textual Commentary

       Editorial Principles

       Subsequent Textual History

       Textual Apparatus

       Emendations in the Copy-Text

       Textual Notes

       Rejected Editorial Changes

       Copy-Text Readings That Differ from Manuscript and Periodical Versions

       Table of Representative Revisions

       Pedigree of Editions

      ILLUSTRATIONS

       Dreiser around 1900

       Dreiser as a mature writer (1917–18)

       Illustration by Louis Sonntag for “The Scotch Express”

       Illustration by William Glackens for “A True Patriarch”

       “Heart Bowed Down,” first page of holograph for sketch for “The Village Feudists”

       Island cabin, Noank, Connecticut

       Dust jacket for Boni and Liveright first edition of Twelve Men, 1919

      PREFACE

      Twelve Men (1919) has long been recognized as Theodore Dreiser’s finest work apart from his novels. H. L. Mencken, who had become increasingly unhappy with Dreiser’s writing after The Titan (1914), thought that it was a return to “the manner of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt… the manner of pure representation, of searching understanding, of unfailing gusto and contagious wonderment.” Mencken had good cause to look to the past in his review of the book. In Twelve Men Dreiser had collected and reshaped material written from the turn of the century to the years just before its publication. The book thus constitutes a rough index to the two most productive decades of his career. It stands as a marker of sorts between the work of those years and his most ambitious book, An American Tragedy, which he began writing shortly after Twelve Men appeared.

      In 1919 no one expected the book to have much of an impact. Even the publisher, Horace Liveright, thought it an expensive indulgence that he hoped would encourage Dreiser to get back to his true business of writing novels. Liveright had no reason to think otherwise. Dreiser’s material was dated: it derived from the 1890s and the pre-World War I years. Moreover, this was, of all things, a quasi-memoir by a German-American author whose loyalties had been questioned publicly during the war. Sales of Twelve Men turned out to be good, however, especially for a work of nonfiction. Although not a best-seller, it developed a solid and broad readership; it went through ten printings between 1919 and 1931 and was issued in the popular Modern Library series. When the American Academy of Arts and Letters presented Dreiser with the Award of Merit Medal in 1944, it cited only three books by title: Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy, and Twelve Men.

      These twelve biographical portraits belong to a distinct species of writing in Dreiser’s oeuvre, a form born of his reluctance to make sharp distinctions between the art of the chronicler and that of the novelist. These essays, which he called “narratives,” combine the character sketch and autobiography within the framework of the short story. Written in the clear, unobtrusive manner of the reporter, they show Dreiser’s command of dialogue and his novelist’s eye for the details of scene and setting. The structure of each narrative—the presentation of selected fragments of a life with the counterpoint of Dreiser’s presence and reaction to the personality—gives the collection a dual direction: outward to objective portraiture of character and place and inward to a portrait of Dreiser himself. The figure at the center of the book shows a number of different faces to his readers. In places he is the Rousseauean author confessing to his youthful inhibitions, in others the man of sensibilité lamenting the inconstancy of fate, and in still others the older writer observing his early years from the lofty heights of worldly experience. The stories are among the best examples of the imaginative possibilities of autobiographical literature as Dreiser practiced it. In them he gives artistic shape to his experience and lifts his material from the realm of journalism to a type of writing that is meditative and affective but difficult to define precisely.

      Although Dreiser’s presence informs each sketch, his subjects, the twelve men of the title, supply the substance that unites their various stories. Collectively they represent individuals whose lives challenge the conventional norms of their time. They range from Dreiser’s charitable