SOURCE: “The City as Noncommunity: Theodore Dreiser and Henry Blake Fuller,” in From Main Street to State Street: Town, City, and Community in America, Kennikat Press, 1977, pp. 68-79.

In the following essay, Goist explores the ideas of community and individuality in the Chicago novels of Fuller and Theodore Dreiser.

Though he lived in cities and even wrote one “urban novel,” Hamlin Garland remained essentially a writer of the frontier or middle border. But the locale of his one effort at city fiction has been the focal point of a good deal of novelistic effort. At the turn of the nineteenth century two of the outstanding novelists of Chicago were Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) and Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929). Their backgrounds were quite different, as were both their literary and life styles. Dreiser came from the hinterlands and spent a good portion of his career attempting to come to terms...