SOURCE: "The Making of Dreiser's Early Short Stories: The Philosopher and the Artist," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 47-63.

In the following essay, Hakutani traces the common belief that Dreiser's thought was inconsistent—romantic, realist, mystic simultaneously—to the early short stories.

In the summer of 1899, shortly before the writing of Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser tried his hand at the short story, his first concentrated effort to write fiction. Whatever technical devices he might have conceived, or whatever technical difficulties he might have encountered in producing his first short stories, the disposition of mind which lay behind and shaped these stories must have grown out of the disposition of the previous years. In fact, as a newspaperman in the early nineties, Dreiser felt severely restricted. He often detested the city editor's control over his selection of news material and his interpretation of it before...