Theodore Dreiser and the Cultures of Travel (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

Theodore Dreiser and the Cultures of Travel examines Dreiser’s three published travel narratives, A Traveler at Forty (1913), A Hoosier Holiday (1916), and Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), along with his 1916–26 travel diaries for trips to Georgia, New Jersey, California, and Florida, and his impressions of his early days as a journalist in New York, captured in Newspaper Days (1922, 1931) and early essays collected in The Color of a Great City (1923). This book is the first sustained analysis of travel narratives from one of the most important US writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dreiser’s fiction is often read in relation to the themes of literary naturalism for which he is best known―such as labor, class struggle, consumer culture, and sexuality―and these travel narratives address these themes while drawing our attention to additional issues informing his work, such as tourist culture, immigration, visual culture, and concerns about US progress. The book not only enhances scholars’ understanding of Dreiser’s narrative style but also provides new insights into how his perspective on American culture at the turn of the twentieth century was informed by his travel experiences and mobility.

Gary Totten is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. He is the author of African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (2015), coeditor of Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing (2015), and editor of Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (2007).