Ethical issues in Financier by Theodore Dreiser - Essay Example

He went to friends of his at the Century Company and proposed they commission Dreiser to write for the Century Magazine three articles on Europe which might eventually be expanded into book length, and at the same time he directed Dreiser to ask Harper's for an advance on The Financier. The result was that on November 18 Century sent Dreiser a check for a thousand dollars for three articles and the option on any book he might write about his trip, and Harper's, upon his depositing with them the first part of his manuscript, agreed to advance him two thousand dollars on The Financier and five hundred dollars against the earnings of Jennie Gerhardt.

In addition Harper's prepared to reissue Sister Carrie. When Richards suggested to Dreiser that even the Nobel Prize was now within his grasp, Dreiser re gained his confidence and on November 22 sailed with Richards on the Mauretania, explaining to an interviewer before embarking that in his new novel "I'm doing the man as I see him. . . . And when I get through with him he'll stand there, unidealized and uncursed, for you . . . to take and judge according to your own lights and blindnesses and attitudes toward life.

" In this spirit he was seeking to observe the "color of life." (Markle 10) Yet, baseless as Dreiser's worries mig. He remembered all the writing that he wished to do, wrote Mencken asking whether he would read the manuscript of The Financier, and although Richards tried to persuade him to visit the Hardy country, decided early in April that he must take the first available ship back to America. This ship happened to be the Titanic, but since it was on its maiden voyage, Richards thought it might be uncomfortable and preferred to secure Dreiser passage on the Kroonland, which arrived in New York at the end of the month, when Dreiser began at once completing The Financier.

Dreiser wanted to call his whole trilogy The Financier, and the first volume simply "Volume One," but Harper's insisted that was commercially inadvisable. Dreiser wanted to shorten his novel so that it would not run to 800 pages, but Harper's was giving him no time to make adequate cuts. Mencken, however, was abroad when Dreiser returned from Europe, and it was not until May 7 that Dreiser could write to him from New York: "Lord[,] I'm glad to know you[']r[e] back. . . . I wish I could talk to you.

I have a whole raft of things to discuss not the least of which is the present plan of publishing this book in 3 volumes -- 1 volume every 6 months. . . . For heaven sake keep in touch with me by mail for I'm rather lonely & I have to work like the devil." Mencken did keep in touch, and while during the summer Jug returned in what was the final attempt to solve the problem of loneliness, Mencken encouraged him in his work, read galleys, suggested the excision of irrelevant details and the expansion of certain incidents, and assured him: "You have described and accounted for and interpreted Cowperwood almost perfectly.