Like Dreiser’s future friend and supporter Mencken, Henry provided an instant figure of authority to Dreiser, who was to show awesome force as a social novelist but little personal self-confidence.ĭreiser was to be permanently scarred by the poverty and shiftlessness of his large family, the rigidity of his German Catholic father, and his own lack of formal education.

Henry was himself a fluent, not in the least interesting writer of fiction, but he had great sophistication, was an “emancipated” husband and assertive thinker in the rebellious style favored by end-of-the-century newspapermen.

It is almost a century since the twenty-eight-year-old Theodore Dreiser suddenly began that first novel in the Fall of 1899 by writing on a half-sheet of yellow copy paper the words “Sister Carrie.” He had never thought of writing fiction until pressed to do so by Arthur Henry, his sometime employer on the Toledo Blade and now his most intimate friend. One day in August 1889 eighteen-year-old Caroline Meeber from Columbia City, Wisconsin-“Sister Carrie as she was half affectionately termed by her family”-boarded a train for Chicago that was to take her (and the surprisingly but never dependably gifted newspaper reporter from Terre Haute who had just put her into his first novel) into world literature. Ford Madox Ford on Dreiser: Portraits From Life Damn it all, it is fun to see that poor old language, that vehicle for conveying moderated thoughts, having the guts kicked out of it, like a deflated football, over all the fields of the boundless Middle West.

Sister carrie book