These are the latest volumes in the Illinois University Press Dreiser Edition which commenced in 2004. The new critical edition of The Financier sets the keynote for the series in its impeccable scholarship. The novel was originally cut significantly at its proof stage for the first 1912 edition and then cut again for its 1927 reissue, which has remained the standard text up to now. This edition restores the 1912 text and comes accompanied by an exceptionally valuable apparatus. In the first appendix the editor discusses Dreiser's use of the financier Charles T. Yerkes as a model for his protagonist, surveys American business novels from the late nineteenth century, and outlines the process of the novel's composition, the latter aided in its last stages by advice from H. L. Mencken. Then follows a section of historical notes and a selection of textual amendments, all of which will certainly make this the definitive edition of The Financier for the future.

The second volume, Political Writings, presents a range of pieces grouped in four sections corresponding to different phases in Dreiser's career and brings a number of pieces into print for the first time. The editorial apparatus of introductions and annotations is impeccable and the volume will clearly constitute a companion to Dreiser's fiction. From the very beginning and in keeping with a number of other twentieth-century US novelists, Dreiser pursued a tandem career as journalist, which offered him regular opportunities to realize his preferred role as writer, namely to be the interpreter of American society. The opening section (1895–1910) shows him adopting the editorial persona of “the prophet” and engaging with major social controversies. One such was the cause of women's suffrage, which Dreiser thought was inevitable providing the “German idea” of romanticized subservience could be combated. A 1913 essay called “The Toil of the Laborer” drew on Dreiser's own experiences when working for the New York Central railroad and meditated on the nature of labour, which he saw as inevitably conflicting with the interests of capital. In this respect the essay sets one of the major themes of this collection, one to which Dreiser returns again and again. A second theme emerges in this period, namely Dreiser's championing the cause of the African American. “The State of the Negro” (1909) is one of his most trenchantly satirical pieces against the routine racism of American society. The result is that African Americans are a “race without a country, a people without a national ideal” (33). Dreiser returned to this cause in 1931 with the notorious Scottsboro case when nine young African Americans were convicted of raping white women on the shakiest of evidence. Dreiser saw their convictions as being symptomatic of a lynch law in action.

Part Two of this collection covers the years from 1911 to 1928, when Dreiser was developing his role of social commentator. In his 1917 essay “Life, Art and America” he attacked what he called the “religion and sex puritanism” of America (51), using the term like H. L. Mencken after him to designate a facade of piety which thinly masked a whole range of criminal activities and therefore the real brutality of American life. From the same year comes “American Idealism and German Frightfulness,” an essay which could not be published at the time because Dreiser would have fallen foul of the Espionage Act. In this piece he returns to hypocrisy, but this time on the international scene. Again and again he attacks the notion of American exceptionalism and saw the First World War as a squalid struggle over imperial power in which the USA was a late participator, but certainly not any better than the European powers. Throughout his political writings Dreiser was expressing an indignant frustration at his country's betrayal of its stated ideals. Thus he concludes that America is the “land of the free corporation, not of the individual” (69, his emphasis) and this is a position which he repeats again and again. In different ways the ethic of individualism, he felt, had allowed the emergence of plutocrats like J. P. Morgan and their associated industrial corporations. There was one sign of hope in this period: the Russian Revolution. Dreiser visited that country in 1927–28 and recorded his impressions in Dreiser Looks at Russia, which is excerpted here. The reprinting of passages from this work and later ones like America Is Worth Saving (1941) presumably implies an editorial decision not to reprint these in their entirety, which is a pity because they remain the most difficult works of Dreiser's to consult and yet in some ways the most informative about phases in his career, however quickly they dated.

Dreiser was drawn to communism partly from his conviction that the main political parties had failed, a conviction that became all the stronger after the Wall Street Crash. The third section of this volume covers the years 1929 to 1937, a period when Dreiser moved decisively further left and as a result the selected texts become more varied, including editorials, contributions to symposia and public statements. It was a period when Dreiser felt that the Communist Party was the only one to engage with the conflict between labour and capital, and also one when he became acutely conscious of the disappearance of free speech. In Tragic America (1931) he recorded his grim perception that individualism had produced in practice the “cunning individual of capitalist leanings and with a will to power” (154), a figure that would link American capitalism with the emergence of the European dictators. The final section (1938–45) focusses mainly on the Second World War, which Dreiser initially saw as yet another struggle for imperial gain that the USA should avoid. Pearl Harbor transformed his views and suddenly he was urging his readers to participate in a “united front” (280). The ending of the war revived Dreiser's support for internationalism and in surely the most quixotic act of his whole career he joined the Communist Party in 1945, long after news had emerged of Stalin's show trials and other excesses. Although he had no time for American claims to lead the free world, Dreiser remained convinced right up to his death that internationalism could be fed by true American idealism and this collection pays eloquent testimony to the sheer difficulty Dreiser experienced in trying to apply the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence.