The Dreiser-Markham Letters: The Correspondence of Theodore Dreiser and Kirah Markham, 1913-1944

Between 1913 and 1916 Theodore Dreiser, already known for his realist portrayals of American city life, experienced a period of exceptional creative activity, which saw him radically rethink his literary techniques and expand the scope of his work. At the same time, Kyra Markham (born Elaine Hyman) was pursuing an acting career in the American “Little Theater” movement. That the pair were lovers, that they inspired, confided in, and criticized each other, and that they could not afford to speak on the telephone while apart has resulted in a substantial correspondence that illuminates their lives and work against the backdrop of the bohemian, dramatic, literary, publishing, and political worlds of the time. Their letters, along with others from their subsequent friendship, are reunited in this volume for the first time. This volume presents their correspondence as a dialogue, albeit one that is incomplete, due to the survival of only a minority of Markham’s letters to Dreiser. This dialogue nevertheless reveals as much about Markham’s testing of the limits of American ideas about gender and authentic living as it does about, for example, Dreiser’s reading and thinking as he reinvented himself as a writer, his struggles with publishers (over The Titan) and censors (over The “Genius”), the development of his plays, his views of Walt Whitman, John Keats, and Thomas Hardy (positive) and Hollywood (not so), and his continual struggles to keep his head above water financially. Of further, but somewhat different interest, are Markham’s and Dreiser’s perceptions of luminaries such as Maurice Browne and a large cast of “minor characters” from American bohemia and elsewhere – Floyd Dell, Margery Currey, Lillian Russell, Laura Jean Libbey, the painter Anne Estelle Rice, “technocracy” advocate Howard Scott, the brilliant but fragile Fritz Krog, and many others. Accordingly, the volume editor Keith Newlin provides extensive notes on all historical personages mentioned (except the few that it was not possible to identify), as well as explicating social, cultural, and occasionally political contexts. This is particularly richly detailed with respect to the Little Theater world in which both Dreiser and Markham were working.