A couple of emails about the Gillette murder case today and a discussion with my wife got me thinking about Dreiser and his novels.

The chief influence on Dreiser the novelist — at the outset — was Balzac, not Zola. The influence of novels like The Wild Ass’s Skin and Père Goriot was immense.

It has been long known that Sister Carrie was Dreiser’s reworking of true story involving his sister Emma and Lorenzo A. Hopkins, the prototype of George Hurstwood.

The story was not an obscure one. Hopkins’s theft from his employer Chapin & Gore (not Fitzgerald and Moy’s, as most people who get their facts from Dreiser’s novel assume) was headline news at the time.

It will probably sound as if I am showing off, but it is apparent to me how often it’s the case that literary scholars and biographers never go much deeper than the author’s works and published information — i.e., secondary sources — in their research; never look elsewhere for critical information.

This was the case with my discoveries about Lorenzo A. Hopkins — the real George Hurstwood. He died in Brooklyn, where he was working as a bartender. He did not go back to his wife in Chicago, as some writers have speculated. (Most biographers, to their credit, dismissed this.)

He had one daughter about whom I found some facts in census and other records, including her marriage record. Her name was Maria and she was married in 1900 at the age of 30. She would have been age 19 at the time of Hopkins’s theft.

No one ever bothered to find out what happened to the real Mrs. Hurstwood: Margaret (Menkler) Hopkins. I found two key records: her suit for divorce from Hopkins; and her subsequent marriage to Alfred D. Lutz, president of the Acme Copying Company in Chicago, in 1892.

Margaret Lutz was murdered by Alfred Lutz’s brother Charles in 1900, subsequent to a dispute he had with Maragret and his brother Charles over his employment at the firm. Margaret took an active interest in the business.

None of this was known before.

No one bothered to try and find the real identity of “Don Ashley” — the lover, in Warsaw, Indiana, of Theodore Dreiser’s jilted sister Sylvia — or the death of Sylvia’s abandoned son Carl Dresser, a bellhop, in Chicago; and possible connections (in Dreiser’s mind) with the fictional Chicago bellhop Clyde Griffiths, and perhaps, in Carl’s mind (he died of asphyxiation from illuminating gas), with Hurstwood’s suicide in Sister Carrie.

Marie Pergain and the toothpick incident

There is loads of information about her. She was a lounge singer and (briefly) a concert pianist; a silent movie actress; and the lover of the Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyiregyházi, whom both Deriser and Helen knew well.

“Marie Pergain—possibly a fictitious name” — Swanberg

“Marie Pergain, probably a pseudonym” — Lingeman

“Miss Pergain’s identity has been a mystery, with many commentators on Dreiser’s Harlan experience holding that since she doesn’t seem to exist outside of that occasion, her name is probably a pseudonym. The mystery has been cleared up. …” — Donald Pizer, “John Dos Passos and Harlan: Three Variations on a Theme,” Arizona Quarterly, Spring 2015

(No acknowledgment of my groundbreaking article.)

“A platinum-blonde Hollywood bit player in the late 1920s who was also a serious student of the piano, Marie Pergain (1911–51) was Nyiregyházi’s mistress in Los Angeles for several years. She met Dreiser in New York in 1930 and began a relationship with him that lasted until early 1932.”  — Pizer, Op. cit.

Pizer jauntily throws out these facts, as if they were discovered by him. He barley acknowledges his sources.

— posted by Roger W Smith

   April 2024

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See:

Lorenzo A. Hopkins (the real George Hurstwood)

Lorenzo A. Hopkins (the real George Hurstwood)

Roger W. Smith, “The Real Julia Hurstwood and the Lutz Murder Case”

Roger W. Smith, “The Real Julia Hurstwood and the Lutz Murder Case”

Roger W. Smith, “Dreiser’s Nephew Carl”

Roger W. Smith, “Dreiser’s Nephew Carl”

Roger W. Smith, “Theodore Dreiser, Ervin Nyiregyházi, Helen Richardson, and Marie Pergain”

Roger W. Smith, “Theodore Dreiser, Ervin Nyiregyházi, Helen Richardson, and Marie Pergain”