Theodore Dreiser

Contents: Survivors / Elsie Singmaster -- Lost Phoebe / Theodore Dreiser -- Golden honeymoon / Ring W. Lardner -- I'm a fool / Sherwood Anderson -- My old man / Ernest Hemingway -- Telephone call / Dorothy Parker -- Double birthday / Willa Cather -- Faithful wife / Morley Callaghan -- Little wife / William March -- Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald-- How beautiful with shoes / Wilbur Daniel Steele -- Resurrection of a life / William Saroyan -- Only the dead know Brooklyn / Thomas Wolfe -- Life in the day of a writer / Tess Slesinger -- Iron City / Lovell Thompson -- Christ in concrete / Pietro Di Donato -- Chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck -- Bright and morning star / Richard Wright -- Hand upon the waters / William Faulkner -- Net / Robert M. Coates -- Nothing ever breaks except the heart / Kay Boyle -- Search through the streets of the city / Irwin Shaw -- Who lived and died believing / Nancy Hale -- Peach stone / Paul Horgan -- Dawn of remembered spring / Jesse Stuart -- Catbird seat / James Thurber -- Of this time, of that place / Lionel Trilling -- Wind and the snow of winter / Walter Van Tilburg Clark -- Enormous radio / John Cheever -- Children are bored on Sunday / Jean Stafford -- NRACP / George P. Elliott -- In Greenwich there are many gravelled walks / Hortense Calisher -- Other foot / Ray Bradbury -- Three players of a summer game / Tennessee Williams -- Mother's tale / James Agee -- Magic barrel / Bernard Malamud -- Circle in the fire / Flannery O'Connor -- First flower / Augusta Wallace Lyons -- Contest for Aaron Gold / Philip Roth -- One ordinary day, with peanuts / Shirley Jackson -- To the wilderness I wander / Frank Butler -- Ledge / Lawrence Sargent Hall -- This morning, this evening, so soon / James Baldwin -- Tell me a riddle / Tillie Olsen -- Old army game / George Garrett -- Pigeon feathers / John Updike -- Sound of a drunken drummer / H.W. Blattner -- Keyhole eye / John Stewart Carter -- Long day's dying / William Eastlake -- Upon the sweeping flood / Joyce Carol Oates.

From The general history of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles / John Smith -- from The history of Plymouth Plantation / William Bradford -- from The bloody tenet yet more bloody ; A letter to the town of Providence / Roger Williams -- Puritan poetry -- Before the birth of cone of her children ; To my dear and loving husband ; The flesh and the spirit ; Verses upon the burning of our house, July 10th, 1666 / Anne Bradstreet -- Preface to God's determinations touching his elect ; Prologue to God's determinations touching his elect ; Huswifery ; Mediation six ; Meditation thirty-eight ; Meditation fifty-six / Edward Taylor -- from Magnalia Christi Americana ; A general introduction ; Galeacius secundus : life of William Bradford / William Byrd -- from The history of the dividing line ; The Dismal Swamp and North Carolina / William Byrd -- Personal narrative ; Notes on the mind ; Nature / Jonathan Edwards -- The way to wealth ; from The autobiography ; Rules by which a great empire may be reduced to a small one ; The ephemera / Benjamin Franklin -- from The journal of John Woolman / John Woolman -- from Letters from an American farmer ; What is an American? / Michel-Guillaume Jean De Crèvecceur -- from Common sense ; Thoughts on the present state of American affairs ; from The age of reason / Thomas Paine -- The unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America ; Letter to John Adams / Thomas Jefferson -- The power of fancy ; To the memory of the brave Americans ; The wild honey suckle ; The Indian burying ground ; To a caty-did / Philip Freneau -- Introductory essay -- Rip Van Winkle ; The stout gentleman ; Legend of the Arabian astrologer ; from A tour of the prairies / Washington Irving -- from The last of the Mohicans / James Fenimore Cooper -- Thanatopsis ; Inscription for the entrance to a wood ; To a waterfowl ; The yellow violet ; A forest hymn ; The death of the flowers ; June ; The evening wind ; Hymn of the city ; Song of Marion;s men ; To the fringed gentian ; The prairies ; The battle-field ; Death of Lincoln ; The floor of years ; from The right of workmen to strike / William Cullen Bryant -- from Nature ; The American scholar ; Self-reliance ; Politics ; from War ; Education ; Good-bye ; Concord hymn ; The rhodora ; Each and all ; Compensation ; The snow-storm ; Unity ; Fable ; Merlin ; The world-soul ; Hamatreya ; Mithridates ; Days ; Brahma ; Two rivers ; Voluntaries III ; Terminus ; Music / Ralph Waldo Emerson. [Young Goodman Brown]( The canal boat ; [The minister's black veil]( [Dr. Heidegger's experiment]( [Rappaccini's daughter]( Earth's holocaust ; Ethan Brand / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- A psalm of life ; The wreck of the Hesperus ; The skeleton in armor ; Walter Von Der Vogelweid ; Evangeline ; The secret of the sea ; My lost youth ; from The song of Hiawatha ; Christmas bells ; Divina commedia ; The challenge ; Shakespeare ; Milton ; Nature ; The tide rises, the tide falls ; The cross of snow / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- To William Lloyd Garrison ; Ichabod ; The Kansas emigrants ; Skipper Ireson's ride ; Snow-bound ; The brewing of Soma / John Greenleaf Whittier -- The fall of the House of Usher ; [Descent into the Maelstrom]( [Masque of the Red Death]( [Tell-tale Heart]( ; [Purloined Letter]( Sonnet, to science ; to Helen ; Israfel ; The city in the sea ; The Sleeper ; To one in paradise ; Hymn ; The conqueror worm ; Dream-land ; The raven ; Ulalume, a ballad ; The bells ; Annabel Lee ; from Poe's review of Twice-told tales ; The philosophy of composition / Edgar Allan Poe -- from The autocrat of the breakfast-table / Oliver Wendell Holmes -- from Walden / Henry David Thoreau -- from A Fable for critics ; from the Biglow papers : first series ; The courtin ; ; Ode recited at the Harvard commemoration / James Russell Lowell --from Typee ; from White-Jacket ; from Moby -Dick ; from Pierre ; The portent ; Misgivings ; Shiloh ; The house-top ; Southern cross / Herman Melville -- from Song of myself ; Crossing Brooklyn Ferry ; Out of the cradle endlessly rocking ; Out of the rolling ocean the crowd ; Beat! Beat! Drums! ; When I heard the learn'd astronomer ; Give me the splendid silent sun ; To a certain civilian ; Bivouac on a mountain side ; Cavalry crossing a ford ; An army corps on the march ; The wound-dresser ; Reconciliation ; O captain! My captain! ; when lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd ; Passage to India ; Darest thou now o soul ; Prayer of Columbus ; To a locomotive in winter ; A noiseless patient spider ; With husky-haughty lips, o sea! ; from Specimen days / Walt Whitman -- Introductory essay -- Letter to the world ; I taste a liquor never brewed ; Success is counted sweetest ; I asked no other thing ; The soul selects her own society ; I'm nobody! ; I like to see it lap the miles ; A thought went up my mind to-day ; The brain is wider than the sky ; What soft, cherubic creatures ; A route of evanescence ; I started early ; A narrow fellow in the grass ; She sweeps with many-colored brooms ; Some keep the Sabbath going to church ; I;ll tell you how the sun rose ; To make a prairie ; If you were coming ; I died for beauty ; I've seen a dying eye ; I never saw a moor ; The last night that she lived ; The morning after death ; Because I could not stop for death ; This quiet dust ; To hear an oriole sing ; I got so I could hear his name ; THe lightning is a yellow fork ; Again his voice is at the door ; Tell all the truth but tell it slant / Emily Dickinson. The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County ; from Roughing it ; The story of the old ram ; from Life on the Mississippi ; The man that corrupted Hadleyburg / Mark Twain -- Muck-a-Muck ; THe luck of roaring camp ; Colonel Starbottle for the plantiff ; Plain language from Truthful James / Bret Harte -- from The rise of Silas Lapham ; from Criticism and fiction / William Dean Howells -- from the Education of Henry Adams / henry Adams -- The stirrup-cup ; Song of the Chattahoochee ; The marshes of Glynn ; A ballad of trees and the master / Sidney Lanier -- The lesson of the master ; The art of fiction / Henry James -- The open boat ; from The black riders ; War is kind / Stephen Crane -- Introductory essay -- George Crabbe ; Credo ; Richard Cory ; Miniver Cheevy ; The man against the sky ; Mr. Flood's party ; from Tristram / Edwin Arlington Robinson -- The second choice / Theodore Dreiser -- The tuft of flowers ; The death of the hired man ; Mending wall ; The code ; The road not taken ; Fire and ice ; Stopping by woods on a snowy evening ; Not to keep ; A minor bird ; There are roughly zones l; a leaf treader ; Bursting rapture / Robert Frost -- Neighbor Rosicky / Willa Cather -- Chicago ; Happiness ; Buttons ; Cool tombs ; Four precludes on playthings of the wind ; Accomplished facts ; from The people, yes / Carl Sandburg -- from Main Street / Sinclair Lewis -- The hairy ape / Eugene O'Neill -- The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock ; The hollow men ; Burnt Norton / T.S. Eliot -- [Wash]( Stockholm address / William Faulkner -- In another country ; A clean, well-lightened place / Ernest Hemingway -- Death the proud brother / Thomas Wolfe.

Young Caroline Meeber leaves home for the first time and experiences work, love, and the pleasures and responsibilities of independence in late-nineteenth-century Chicago and New York.

A collection of fifteen semi-fictionalized biographical sketches of women.

By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer with an international reputation, as well as a fixture on the New York literary scene. He had not been back to Indiana, his home state, in over twenty years when he was approached by his friend Franklin Booth, a respected and very successful artist, to make the trip together by automobile. The result is a narrative brimming with detail and the first modern work of American road literature, capturing the euphoric freedom to be found behind the wheel of a car.

The two brothers (Anpu and Bata) / Anonymous -- Setna and the magic book / Anonymous -- Eumæus' : talk / Homer -- The country mouse and the town mouse / Æsop -- King Rhampsinitus and the thief / Herodotus -- Phineus and the harpies / Apollonius of Rhodes -- The robbers of Egypt / Heliodorus -- Horatius at the bridge / Livy -- Orpheus and the Eurydice / Ovid -- The shipwreck of Simonides / Phædrus -- The matron of Ephesus / Petronius -- The haunted house / Pliny the Younger -- The dream / Apuleius -- The book of Ruth (Old Testament) -- The history of Susanna (The Apocrypha) -- The prodigal son (New Testament) -- The raising of Lazarus (New Testament) -- Rabbi Akiva (The Talmud) -- The Jewish mother (The Talmud) -- The ass in the lion's skin (Jataka) -- The dove and the crow (Panchatantra) -- The story of Devadatta / Somadeva -- The jackal (Hitopadesa) -- Jamshid and Zuhak / Firdawsi -- The sailor and the pearl merchant / Anonymous -- Khaled and Djaida / Al-Asmal -- Abou Hassan the wag (Thousand and one nights) -- Grendel's raid (Beowulf) -- Esyllt and Sabrina / Geoffrey of Monmouth -- The humbling of Jovinian (Gesta Romanorum) -- Lludd and Llevelys (The Mabinogion) -- Launcelot's tourney / Sir Thomas Malory -- Roberto's tale / Robert Greene -- True relation of the apparition of one Mrs. Veal / Daniel Defoe -- The story of an heir / Joseph Addison -- The disabled soldier / Oliver Goldsmith -- The bridal of Janet Dalrymple / Sir Walter Scott -- The white trout / Samuel Lover -- The queer client / Charles Dickens -- A terribly strange bed / Wilkie Collins -- Squire Petrick's lady / Thomas Hardy -- Thrawn Janet / Robert Louis Stevenson -- The selfish giant / Oscar Wilde -- Julia Cahill's curse / George Moore -- That brute Simmons / Arthur Morrison. The lay of Hildebrand / Anonymous -- Siegfried and Kriemhild (The lay of the Nibelungs) -- The coming of Gandin / Gottfried von Strassburg -- Bruin the bear & Reynard the fox (Reynard the fox) -- Eulenspiegel and the merchant (Eulenspiegel) -- Doctor Faust and the usurer (The history of Dr. J. Faust) -- The sick wife / Christian Gellert -- Little Briar-Rose / The brothers Grimm -- The story of Serapion / E.T.A. Hoffmann -- The legend of the dance / Gottfried Keller -- The fury / Paul Heyse -- The triple warning / Arthur Schnitzler -- A New-Year's Eve confession / Hermann Sudermann -- The divided horsecloth / Bernier -- The priest and the mulberries / Anonymous -- The lay of the two lovers / Marie de France -- The pious lady and the gray friar / Marguerite de Navarre -- He who married a dumb wife ; The roast-meat seller / François Rabelais -- Little Red Riding-Hood / Charles Perrault -- The four friends / Jean de Lafontaine -- Memnon the philosopher / Voltaire -- Lausus and Lydia / J.F. Marmontel -- The mysterious mansion / Honoré de Balzac -- Mateo Falcone / Prosper Mérimée -- The mummy's foot / Théophile Gautier -- The torture of hope / Villiers de L'Isle Adam -- The last lesson / Alphonse Daudet -- The fairy Amoureuse / Émile Zola -- The substitute / François Coppée -- Our lady's juggler / Anatole France -- The necklace / Guy de Maupassant -- The bell of Atri (The hundred ancient tales) -- The falcon / Giovanni Boccaccio -- Galgano / Ser Giovanni -- The two ambassadors / Franco Sacchetti -- The cavalier of Toledo / Masuccio (Guardato) -- Belphagor / Niccolo Macchiavelli -- A king in disguise / Matteo Bandello -- The friar of Novara / Agnolo Firenzuola -- The Greek merchant / Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio -- The Venetian silk-mercer / Carlo Gozzi. Cavalleria rusticana / Giovanni Verga -- The peasant's will / Antonio Fogazzaro -- Mendicant melody / Edmondo de Amicis -- Lulu's triumph / Matilde Serao -- The hero / Gabriele d'Annunzio -- Two miracles / Grazia Deledda -- The miracle of the Jew (Chronicle of the Cid) -- The son and his friends / Juan Manuel -- How Lazaro served a bulero / Diego Hurtado de Mendoza -- Guzman and my lord Cardinal / Mateo Alemán -- Rinconete and Cortadillo / Miguel Cervantes -- The tall woman / Pedro Antonio de Alarcón -- Maese Perez, the organist / Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer -- Adios, Cordera! / Leopoldo Alas -- Story of Ming-Y ; Fickle widow (Marvelous tales) -- The virtuous daughter-in-law / Pu Sung-Ling -- The forty-seven ronins [ronin] / Anonymous -- The pier / Mori Ogwai -- A domestic animal / Shimazaki Toson -- The higher the flight the lower the fall / Jacob Cats -- The story of Saidjah / Eduard Douwes Dekker -- Grandfather's birthday present / Herman Heijermans -- The invisible wound / Karoly Kisfaludi -- A ball / Maurus Jokai -- The green fly / Kalman Mikszath -- The silver hilt / Ferenc Molnar -- The snow storm / Alexander Pushkin -- St. John's eve / Nikolai Gogol -- The district doctor / Ivan Turgenev -- The Christmas tree and the wedding / Feodor Dostoievsky [Dostoyevsky] -- The long exile / Leo Tolstoy -- The old bell-ringer / Vladimir Korolenko -- The signal / Vsevolod Garshin -- The bet / Anton Chekhov -- One autumn night / Maxim Gorky -- Silence / Leonid Andreyev. The lighthouse keeper of Aspinwall / Henryk Sienkiewicz -- The human telegraph / Boleslav Prus -- Forebodings / Stefan Zeromski -- A woman's wrath / Isaac Loeb Peretz -- The Passover guest / Sholom Aleichem -- A picnic / S. Libin -- The Kaddish / Abraham Raisin -- Abandoned / Sholom Asch -- In the storm / David Pinski -- Baldr's bale / Snorri Sturluson -- Regin's tale (Volsunga saga) -- The shepherdess and the sweep / Hans Christian Andersen -- Henrik and Rosalie / Meyer Aron Goldschmidt -- Two worlds / Jens Peter Jacobsen -- Smith who could not get into hell / Peter Christen Asbjörnsen and Jörgen Moe -- The father / Björnstjerne Björnson -- Skobelef / Johan Bojer -- Love and bread / August Strindberg -- The eclipse / Slema Lagerlöf -- The falcon / Per Hallström -- The mysterious picture / Charles de Coster -- The massacre of the innocents / Maurice Maeterlinck -- The soul of Veere / Camille Lemonnier -- One night / Emile Verhaeren -- The neighbor / Antun Gustav Matos -- Children and old folk / Ivan Cankar -- At the well / Laza K. Lazarevich -- The vampire / Jan Neruda -- Foltyn's drum / Svatopluk Cech -- The priest's tale / Demetrios Bikelas -- The Easter torch / I.L. Caragiale -- What Vasile saw / Marie, Queen of Roumania -- The commissioner's Christmas / Dimitr Ivanov -- Chivalry / Ricardo Fernández-García -- The attendant's confession / J.M. Machado de Assis -- The legend of Pygmalion / Ventura García-Calderón -- Creole democracy / Rufíno Blanco-Fombóna -- The deaf satyr / Rubén Darío -- The specter bridegroom / Washington Irving -- Mrs. Bullfrog / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- [Tell-tale Heart]( / Edgar Allan Poe -- Journalism in Tennessee / Mark Twain -- The man and the snake / Ambrose Bierce -- The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte -- The story in it / Henry James -- King Solomon of Kentucky / James Lane Allen -- Miss Tempy's watchers / Sarah Orne Jewett -- A letter and a paragraph / Henry Cuyler Bunner -- Supply and demand / O. Henry -- A dark-brown dog / Stephen Crane -- The lost Phoebe / Theodore Dreiser -- Sophistication / Sherwood Anderson -- A Wagner matinée / Willa Cather -- A brown woman / James Branch Cabell.

Frank Algernon Cowperwood, the central character of Theodore Dreiser's previous work "The Financier," is now out of the Eastern District Penitentiary of Philadelphia. He still has his mistress and his fortune, plans to divorce his wife, and leaves for Chicago to scout its possibilities for a future home. He has letters of introduction to the most influential people--a bank president named Mr. Addison, for a start. Cowperwood is presented to others--lawyers, businessmen, and judges. At this beginning not one of them knew he had been incarcerated, and he wondered if that knowledge would affect their attitude towards him. He finally confesses his recent history to Addison and decides to establish his new company in Chicago. He carefully and thoroughly scrutinizes the conditions for establishing a wealth that would be envied by powerful men and selfish women. "The magnetizing power of fame is great." As Cowperwood climbs the glorified mountain and sets out to ultimately conquer this new world, his past foibles overcome him again--his desire for beautiful women, his acquisition of unbelievable wealth, his need to be accepted and understood and revered. His genius for social and financial manipulations fails him in politics. The ending is a philosophical overview of what has happened and what can happen to a man with a restless heart.

Presents his first two novels and an early, little-known collection of portraits about men he knew.

The Stories Chosen for This Year's Anthology