Review-Essay: Dreiser on the Web

Roger W. Smith

A search on the google.com Internet search engine conducted in March 2003 produced approximately 36,700 hits using the search term “Dreiser.” This number would seem to indicate that there is a wealth of Dreiser-related material all over the Internet. In actuality, however, this does not seem to be the case. Potentially valuable information on Dreiser is confined by and large to very few sites. Much of what is on the web related to Dreiser is of marginal or dubious value, especially to Dreiser scholars. Web sites with Dreiser content range from term paper mills that offer execrable papers on Sister Carrie, which appear in several cases to have been written by “grammatically challenged” term paper writers, to the University of Pennsylvania Library’s superbly designed and tremendously informative DreiserWebSource, which contains valuable reference materials on Dreiser and a detailed, box-by-box and folder-by-folder inventory of the university’s Dreiser collection. The Internet provides ready access to libraries and other repositories containing Dreiser papers or papers of individuals with whom Dreiser was connected during his lifetime (e.g., Robert Elias, Marguerite Tjader Harris). Such sites can be extremely useful. There are six major library repositories of Dreiser papers, all of which have a web site, and in most cases the contents of the collections are inventoried in detail.

The web can also point the scholar to other repositories where Dreiser materials can be found—for example, Dreiser correspondence scattered among various collections of private papers and records of literary agents and publishing firms that had dealings with Dreiser. Locating such material can be made much easier with a search on the web, which can be accomplished efficiently if one has an idea of what one is looking for.

There is a wealth of materials available on the Internet in PDF and JPG format—which are file extensions indicating that the content of a page is a facsimile image of an actual document or photograph. These images consist of letters and photos that the scholar can view electronically on his or her computer screen without having to go to a library or private collection. There are hundreds of photos of Dreiser and associates at all phases of his life available on the web, all of which can be downloaded. And there are hundreds of images of actual letters from and to Dreiser. The University of Pennsylvania Library’s DreiserWebSource site is truly outstanding in this regard.

Once can also make serendipitous discoveries about Dreiser on the web. For example, at the site “Script for August 27, 1996,” Merriam-Webster’s Word for the Wise  http://www.m-w.com/textonly/wftw/82796.htm , I found to my surprise that more than two dozen entries in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language cite Dreiser’s prose as examples of usage.

Sites with Dreiser-related content contain the following types of materials ranked in descending order from the potentially most to least useful:

1. Web sites dedicated to Dreiser.

2. Inventories of Dreiser archives and Dreiser-related collections.

3. Bibliographies.

4. E-texts of Dreiser works and of others connected with the study of Dreiser.

5. Sites and repositories devoted to individuals and institutions with whom Dreiser was connected during his career. These include, among others, the Robert Elias papers, the Marguerite Tjader Harris papers, the Street and Smith archive, and the web site of the Charles Fort Society.

6. Sites devoted to authors (e.g., author societies) connected with Dreiser either directly or indirectly because of their association with literary naturalism.

7. A small number of academic papers on Dreiser in electronic format. Some books and articles are available through proprietary services that require a subscription fee. In addition, some key, seminal articles on Dreiser and literary naturalism are posted on line for free.

8. Teaching aids related to Dreiser and his works and a limited amount of introductory material about naturalism in American literature.

9. Online encyclopedia entries on Dreiser.

10. Sites with information about Dreiser-related films and plays.

11. Miscellaneous material on Dreiser of value from a biographical or factual point of view.

12. Misrepresentation and misappropriation of Dreiser on the web.

Criteria for Selection

It is difficult to be exhaustive when dealing with a “database” as vast as the World Wide Web, but I have tried to be exhaustive in covering Dreiser-related web content. The following criteria were used in selecting which web sites to inventory and review:

• The degree of value for a Dreiser scholar. Is there something that can be found there that is not available elsewhere (or is presented in such a way to make it worthwhile to visit the site)? This could include a fact or opinion, a reminiscence, a piece of biographical data that might escape notice elsewhere. Accordingly, this review includes both sites that are devoted to Dreiser and/or contain substantial content about him as well as those that merely mention him in passing. It also includes web sites that provide useful background information about individuals connected with Dreiser or his works (e.g., Charles T. Yerkes, the Gillette murder case).

• Materials that can ease or otherwise facilitate a scholar’s access to Dreiser materials. These include, for example, e-texts of books and articles by and about Dreiser, web text (HTML) of Dreiser-related correspondence, and facsimiles of Dreiser-related correspondence. An astonishing amount of correspondence is available in facsimile, which can greatly ease the scholar’s task. Most of the correspondence is in one place, the University of Pennsylvania Library, and can be found on the library’s web site devoted to Dreiser, but in other cases a letter or two may be found at other sites or at the web site of an auction house seeking to sell an autograph letter from or to Dreiser. All libraries and repositories with web sites that contain any Dreiser-related correspondence (or other Dreiser-related materials) are listed below. At the least, one can learn of the existence, location, and access to such a collection, and several library web sites provide detailed inventories of the Dreiser-related materials in their possession.

• E-texts of Dreiser-related books and articles. Textual materials vary widely in terms of depth and importance and even in terms of how elegantly the page is designed. (Some pages of e-text are dreary to look at, “typographically” speaking.) All Dreiser-related writings posted on the Internet (or those originally published on the Internet) are included here. Web links to Dreiser-related publications can be used to complement traditional library research. Some Dreiser materials available on line as e-text require a subscription to access, and such instances are noted where applicable. Those databases providing access to full-text versions of print journals (such as JSTOR and EBSCOhost) and which are available only through subscription have not been included.

• Another criterion for inclusion is a site’s helpfulness to students, and only those sites which provide accurate and helpful information concerning Dreiser are included. No attempt has been made to be exhaustive here.

• Finally, only those author or society sites with relevance to Dreiser studies are included.

Note: to aid in the use of this review, this article appears simultaneously with publication on the Dreiser Society web site at http://www.uncw.edu/dreiser/TDweb.htm , with active hyperlinks and cross-references.