SOURCE: "Dreiser's Ant Tragedy: The Revision of The Shining Slave Makers'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter, 1977, pp. 41-8.

In the following essay, Graham compares two versions of "The Shining Slave Makers" and notes how Dreiser stressed the struggle for life and "humanistic" values in the latter version.

In 1900 Theodore Dreiser wrote a long letter to Robert Underwood Johnson, the associate editor of the Century, protesting his decision not to publish Dreiser's "ant tragedy," a short story titled "The Shining Slave Makers" [Letters of Theodore Dreiser, 1959]. The letter championed imagination and emotional power over rigid adherence to scientific fact. Far from overturning Johnson's decision, Dreiser was obliged, upon receiving a second letter from Johnson, to apologize for his charge that no literary editor had read the story [Letters]. Sometime later, Ainslee's Magazine accepted the work and published it in June, 1901.

The "allegory" that Johnson disliked and...