A Hoosier Holiday

Theodore Dreiser

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780253028082
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

"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.

CONTENTS

I.	THE ROSE WINDOW
II.	THE SCENIC ROUTE
III.	ACROSS THE MEADOWS TO THE PASSAIC
IV.	THE PIETY AND EGGS OF PATERSON
V.	ACROSS THE DELAWARE
VI.	AN AMERICAN SUMMER RESORT
VII.	THE PENNSYLVANIANS
VIII.	BEAUTIFUL WILKES-BARRE
IX.	IN AND OUT OF SCRANTON
X.	A LITTLE AMERICAN TOWN
XI.	THE MAGIC OF THE ROAD AND SOME TALES
XII.	RAILROADS AND a NEW WONDER OF THE WORLD
XIII.	A COUNTRY HOTEL
XIV.	THE CITY OF SWAMP ROOT
XV.	A RIDE BY NIGHT
XVI.	CHEMUNG
XVII.	CHICKEN AND WAFFLES AND THE TOON O’ BATH
XVIII.	MR. HUBBARD AND AN AUTOMOBILE FLIRTATION
XIX.	THE REV. J. CADDEN MCMICKENS
XX.	THE CAPITAL OF THE FRA
XXI.	BUFFALO OLD AND NEW
XXII.	ALONG THE ERIE SHORE
XXIII.	THE APPROACH TO ERIE
XXIV.	THE WRECKAGE OF A STORM
XXV.	CONNEAUT
XXVI.	THE GAY LIFE OF THE LAKE SHORE
XXVII.	A SUMMER STORM AND SOME COMMENTS ON THE PICTURE POSTCARD
XXVIII.	IN CLEVELAND
XXIX.	THE FLAT LANDS OF OHIO
XXX.	OSTEND PURGED OF SIN
XXXI.	WHEN HOPE HOPPED HIGH
XXXII.	THE FRONTIER OF INDIANA
XXXIII.	ACROSS THE BORDER OF BOYLAND
XXXIV.	A MIDDLE WESTERN CROWD
XXXV.	WARSAW AT LAST
XXXVI.	WARSAW IN 1884–6
XXXVII.	THE OLD HOUSE
XXXVIII.	DAY DREAMS
XXXIX.	THE KISS OF FAIR GUSTA
XL.	OLD HAUNTS AND OLD DREAMS
XLI.	BILL ARNOLD AND HIS BROOD
XLII.	IN THE CHAUTAUQUA BELT
XLIII.	THE MYSTERY OF COINCIDENCE
XLIV.	THE FOLKS AT CARMEL
XLV.	AN INDIANA VILLAGE
XLVI.	A SENTIMENTAL INTERLUDE
XLVII.	INDIANAPOLIS AND a GLYMPSE OF FAIRYLAND
XLVIII.	THE SPIRIT OF TERRE HAUTE
XLIX.	TERRE HAUTE AFTER THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS
L.	A LUSH, EGYPTIAN LAND
LI.	ANOTHER “OLD HOME”
LII.	HAIL, INDIANA!
LIII.	FISHING IN THE BUSSERON AND A COUNTY FAIR
LIV.	THE FERRY AT DECKER
LV.	A MINSTREL BROTHER
LVI.	EVANSVILLE
LVII.	THE BACKWOODS OF INDIANA
LVIII.	FRENCH LICK
LIX.	A COLLEGE TOWN
LX.	“BOOSTER DAY” AND A MEMORY
LXI.	THE END OF THE JOURNEY

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 HOOSIER HOLIDAY (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 fir...