Twelve Men. Theodore Dreiser

      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