A Hoosier Holiday

Theodore Dreiser

Description

A Selection of The Reader's Subscription

"Though far from the author's usual musings, this is actually a forerunner to the American road novel and very well could have been one of the inspirations for Jack Kerouac . . . this is a fine addition to public and academic libraries." —Library Journal

"Theodore Dreiser, road warrior . . . Dreiser's account of his homecoming will touch a familiar and responsive chord in anyone who has undertaken one. . . . In that, as in so much else in this book, as in the great body of all his work, Dreiser in his earnest, heartfelt, clumsy way speaks to the universal experience." —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

"Because [the book] provides a portrait of the artist as a young man and describes the nation as a mosaic of individual cultures, Dreiser's journey offers several different lessons. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part collection of essays, A Hoosier Holiday lays out the landscape of a nation that ceased to exist once the highway unfurled across the map." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer living in New York. He had not been back to his home state in over 20 years. When his friend Franklin Booth approached him with the idea of driving from New York to Indiana, Dreiser's response to Booth was immediate: "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it." Along the route, Dreiser recorded his impressions of the people and land in words while his traveling companion sketched some of these scenes. In this reflective tale, Dreiser and Booth cross four states to arrive at Indiana and the sites and memories of Dreiser's early life in Terre Haute, Sullivan, Evansville, Warsaw, and his one year at Indiana University.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• América
• Literature
• General officer
• General
• American
• Autobiography
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 avril 1997
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253028082
• Langue: English

Extrait

A HOOSIER HOLIDAY
THE WARSAW HOME
The Mecca of this trip
Frontispiece
A HOOSIER HOLIDAY
with Illustrations by FRANKLIN BOOTH
and a New Introduction by DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
THEODORE DREISER
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN   47404-3797   USA
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This version of A Hoosier Holiday was originally published in 1916. Introduction © 1997 by Douglas Brinkley First reprinted in paperback in 1998.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dreiser, Theodore, 1871–1945.      A Hoosier Holiday / Theodore Dreiser ; with illustrations by Franklin   Booth and a new introduction by Douglas Brinkley.      p. cm.   ISBN 0-253-33283-4 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-253-21121-2 (alk. paper.: pbk.)   1. Indiana—Description and travel. 2. Pennsylvania—Description and travel. 3. Ohio—Description and travel. 4. New York (State)—Description and travel. 5. Dreiser, Theodore, 1871–1945—Journeys. 6. Booth, Franklin, 1874–1948—Journeys. I. Title. E169.D77   1997 917.7204’41—dc21 96–51687
3  4  5  6  7  03  02  01  00  99  98
TO MY MOTHER
CONTENTS
 
 
  I. T HE R OSE W INDOW II. T HE S CENIC R OUTE III. A CROSS THE M EADOWS TO THE P ASSAIC IV. T HE P IETY AND E GGS OF P ATERSON V. A CROSS THE D ELAWARE VI. A N A MERICAN S UMMER R ESORT VII. T HE P ENNSYLVANIANS VIII. B EAUTIFUL W ILKES -B ARRE IX. I N AND O UT OF S CRANTON X. A L ITTLE A MERICAN T OWN XI. T HE M AGIC OF THE R OAD AND S OME T ALES XII. R AILROADS AND a N EW W ONDER OF THE W ORLD XIII. A C OUNTRY H OTEL XIV. T HE C ITY OF S WAMP R OOT XV. A R IDE BY N IGHT XVI. C HEMUNG XVII. C HICKEN AND W AFFLES AND THE T OON O’ B ATH XVIII. M R . H UBBARD AND AN A UTOMOBILE F LIRTATION XIX. T HE R EV . J. C ADDEN M C M ICKENS XX. T HE C APITAL OF THE F RA XXI. B UFFALO O LD AND N EW XXII. A LONG THE E RIE S HORE XXIII. T HE A PPROACH TO E RIE XXIV. T HE W RECKAGE OF A S TORM XXV. C ONNEAUT XXVI. T HE G AY L IFE OF THE L AKE S HORE XXVII. A S UMMER S TORM AND S OME C OMMENTS ON THE P ICTURE P OSTCARD XXVIII. I N C LEVELAND XXIX. T HE F LAT L ANDS OF O HIO XXX. O STEND P URGED OF S IN XXXI. W HEN H OPE H OPPED H IGH XXXII. T HE F RONTIER OF I NDIANA XXXIII. A CROSS THE B ORDER OF B OYLAND XXXIV. A M IDDLE W ESTERN C ROWD XXXV. W ARSAW AT L AST XXXVI. W ARSAW IN 1884–6 XXXVII. T HE O LD H OUSE XXXVIII. D AY D REAMS XXXIX. T HE K ISS OF F AIR G USTA XL. O LD H AUNTS AND O LD D REAMS XLI. B ILL A RNOLD AND H IS B ROOD XLII. I N THE C HAUTAUQUA B ELT XLIII. T HE M YSTERY OF C OINCIDENCE XLIV. T HE F OLKS AT C ARMEL XLV. A N I NDIANA V ILLAGE XLVI. A S ENTIMENTAL I NTERLUDE XLVII. I NDIANAPOLIS AND a G LYMPSE OF F AIRYLAND XLVIII. T HE S PIRIT OF T ERRE H AUTE XLIX. T ERRE H AUTE A FTER T HIRTY -S EVEN Y EARS L. A L USH , E GYPTIAN L AND LI. A NOTHER “O LD H OME ” LII. H AIL , I NDIANA ! LIII. F ISHING IN THE B USSERON AND A C OUNTY F AIR LIV. T HE F ERRY AT D ECKER LV. A M INSTREL B ROTHER LVI. E VANSVILLE LVII. T HE B ACKWOODS OF I NDIANA LVIII. F RENCH L ICK LIX. A C OLLEGE T OWN LX. “B OOSTER D AY ” AND A M EMORY LXI. T HE E ND OF THE J OURNEY
ILLUSTRATIONS
 
 
 
The Warsaw Home
The Old Essex and Morris Canal
Wilkes-Barre
A Coal Breaker Near Scranton
Franklin Studies an Obliterated Sign
Factoryville Bids Us Farewell
The Great Bridge at Nicholsen
Florence and the Arno, at Owego
Beyond Elmira
Franklin Dreams Over a River Beyond Savona
The “Toon O’ Bath”
Egypt at Buffalo
Pleasure before Business
Conneaut, Ohio
The Bridge That Is to Make Franklin Famous
Where I Learn That I Am Not to Live Eighty Years
Cedar Point, Lake Erie
Hicksville
With the Old Settlers at Columbia City, Indiana
Central Indiana
In Carmel
The Best of Indianapolis
The Standard Bridge of Fifty Years Ago
Franklin’s Impression of My Birthplace
Terre Haute from West of the Wabash
My Father’s Mill
Vincennes
The Ferry at Decker
The Ohio at Evansville
A Beautiful Tree on a Vile Road
A Cathedral of Trees
French Lick
A HOOSIER HOLIDAY
INTRODUCTION
Theodore Dreher and the Birth of the Road Book
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
A H OOSIER H OLIDAY (1916) grew out of an August 1915 party given by novelist Theodore Dreiser, the author of Sister Carrie (1900), in uptown Manhattan to honor Edgar Lee Masters, who that spring had awakened the literary community with the publication of Spoon River Anthology , a best-selling volume of poetry. New York reporters covered the convivial gathering as if it were a glitzy bohemian ball, noting that the eclectic guest list included “parlor socialists, artists, bobbed hair models, temperamental pianists, girls in smocks and sandals and a corporation lawyer in a soft-boiled shirt.” And, most importantly for Dreiser, the respected Masses illustrator and native Indianan Franklin Booth was in attendance, his brand-new automobile parked outside.
All evening long, even as Masters read from Spoon River Anthology , Booth boasted about his sixty-horsepower Pathfinder touring car. “How would you like to go out to Indiana in my car?” Booth asked Dreiser, a fellow Hoosier who hadn’t visited the towns of his youth—Terre Haute, Vincennes, Sullivan, Warsaw, and Bloomington—in twenty-seven years. It took Dreiser all of a second to seize the opportunity and a collaborative deal was struck: Dreiser would write a book about their motorized pilgrimage from New York to Indiana, and Booth would illustrate it. Two weeks later, the artistic duo chugged out of bustling Manhattan in the Pathfinder, destined for the lazy blue hills of Pennsylvania and beyond.
Although they didn’t realize it at the time, a literary subgenre—the American automobile road book—was about to be born. The motorized trek resulted in Theodore Dreiser’s 500-page A Hoosier Holiday , a narrative brimming with detail and the text singularly responsible for bringing the automobile to the forefront of American literature. It also marks the first time a serious writer captured the euphoric freedom to be found behind the wheel of a car: “We clambered up the bank on the farther side, the car making great noise. In this sweet twilight with fireflies and spirals of gnats and ‘pinchin’ bugs … we tore the remainder of the distance, the eyes of the car glowing like great flames.” As H. L. Mencken perceptively noted in The Smart Set (October 1916), A Hoosier Holiday —along with certain outstanding sections of The Titan (1917)— marked “the high tide of Dreiser’s writing”—high praise indeed.
The Western tradition of travel writing can be traced back at least to thirteenth-century Icelandic and Norwegian epic narratives, but it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century and the emergence of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau that “the journey” took on a decidedly introspective, self-reflective dimension. “Every walk is a sort of crusade,” Thoreau proclaimed, “preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the Hands of the Infidels.”
Ironically, Thoreau’s infidels—the industrialists who preached the gospel of unfettered commerce—would ultimately make the modern genre of “highway literature” or “road books” possible by inventing the automobile. Motorized travel gave the generation entering Henry Luce’s “American Century” something transcendental indeed: “Thoreau at 29 cents a gallon,” as one commentator put it.
No sooner had the automobile been created than a flood of public relations stunts, from races to marathon drives, was unleashed to promote the novel mechanical horse. Highway billboards became an effective way for the auto industry to make new buyers realize that “Even You Can Afford a Ford,” and the arrival of “horseless carriages” in cities such as Omaha and Denver was an event as big as a Billy Sunday evangelical revival or a Buffalo Bill Wild West show. By the time Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, the Tin Pan Alley jingle “In My Merry Oldsmobile” was being hummed down almost every Main Street in America. One of the manufacturers’ favorite ploys to promote their shiny new product was to stage long-distance treks to prove the durability of the automobile—and then distribute a written account of the heroics far and wide. These publications, along with manufacturers’ promotional pamphlets, song-sheets, and racing books, can be considered the seeds of highway literature, all designed to stir consumers’ imaginations and open their wallets.
With the number of cars registered in the United States growing from a few thousand to almost half a million it w