Though more highly regarded for his themes of social conflict than for his style, American novelist Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) had a reporter's eye for detail. In this paragraph from Chapter 15 of The Genius, Dreiser conveys a new arrival's feelings of excitement and isolation in early 20th-century Manhattan.
from The Genius*
by Theodore Dreiser
He went about this early relationship to the city in the right spirit. For a little while he did not try to think what he would do, but struck out and walked here, there, and everywhere, this very first day down Broadway to the City Hall and up the Broadway from 14th to 42nd Street the same night. Soon he knew all Third Avenue and the Bowery, the wonders of Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive, the beauties of the East River, the Battery, Central Park and the Lower East Side. He sought out quickly the wonders of metropolitan life--its crowds at dinner and theater time in Broadway, its tremendous throngs morning and afternoon in the shopping district, its amazing world of carriages in Fifth Avenue and Central Park. He had marveled at wealth and luxury in Chicago, but here it took his breath away. It was obviously so much more fixed, so definite and comprehensible. Here one felt instinctively the far reaches which separate the ordinary man from the scion of wealth. It curled him up like a frozen leaf, dulled his very soul, and gave him a clear sense of his position in the social scale. He had come here with a pretty high estimate of himself, but daily, as he looked, he felt himself crumbling. What was he? What was art? What did the city care? It was much more interested in other things, in dressing, eating, visiting, riding abroad. The lower part of the island was filled with cold commercialism which frightened him. In the upper half, which concerned only women and show--a voluptuous sybaritism--caused him envy. He had but two hundred dollars with which to fight his way, and this was the world he must conquer.
* The "Genius," by Theodore Dreiser, was first published by the John Lane Company in 1915, reprinted by Kessinger Publishing in 2004.
