Volume 36, Number 18 · November 23, 1989
Lyrical Dreiser
By Andrew Delbanco
Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men
edited by Richard Lehan
Library of America, 1,168 pp., $27.50
'In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life,' Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, 'somebody is always at the drowning-point.' It was not the deprivation of the poor that interested Hawthorne, but rather the fall of those born high—the experience of failure. Like most of his contemporaries, Hawthorne did not look closely at the conspicuous castaways of antebellum America. Even to Melville, the face of social misery tended to be a foreign one. When he wrote in Redburn (1849) of his back-alley encounter with 'the figure of what had been a woman…[in whose] blue arms [were] folded to her livid bosom two shrunken things like children,' he was writing about the desperate poor of Liverpool, not New York.
Review, 6337 words
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