To accompany these largely unseen images, Doug Skinner offers a brief appreciation of the friendship between these two very different men of American letters.

All photographs courtesy of Theodore Dreiser papers, rare book & manuscript library, University of Pennsylvania. With thanks to Nancy M Shawcross and John Pollack. Visit their site here

What would you do if you had the kind of brains I have?" Charles Fort once asked Theodore Dreiser. "I suspect that strange orthogenetic gods are mixed up in all this." 1 Perhaps; and perhaps the same celestial perfectionists guided the friendship of those two. They were an unlikely pair in many ways, but oddly compatible.

They met in 1905. Dreiser was editing a fiction magazine, Smith’s, and bought some of Fort’s yarns. They were, he later recalled, "the best humorous short stories that I have ever seen produced in America… realistic, ironic, wise and in their way, beautiful.2 He accepted more of Fort’s stories in subsequent editorships, and recommended them to other magazines. As it turned out, Fort and Dreiser had much in common: they were both ex-newspapermen, both fictionists developing unique versions of urban realism, both eccentric stylists. Both delighted in metaphysical speculation. And both were deeply unconventional: Dreiser fought a continual war against all American values; Fort simply ignored them. The two soon became quite friendly.

Fort’s keen and colourful stories of Manhattan tenements eventually culminated in his novel, The Outcast Manufacturers. Dreiser read the manuscript, and was puzzled; he "found it a little difficult," and complained that Fort made little use of "the art of luring your readers on." 3 He urged Fort to collect his stories. Fort, however, was rapidly losing interest in fiction, and turning to the ontological satire that inspired the rest of his career. (A delicious batch of the stories, by the way, is assembled by that fine fortean scholar, Mr X, at www.resologist.net.)

Fort’s first salvo in his new manner, X (no relation), was a freewheeling exposition of "autogenetic orthogenesis". Dreiser responded with a few critiques, but concluded: "Just the same it’s an astonishing book. Slightly worked over it ought to sell a hundred thousand." 4 Fort did work it over, and soon brandished a sequel, Y, which Dreiser liked even better: "My impression is that you are out-Verning Verne… You are one of the most remarkable literary figures I have ever known." 5 Dreiser tried to find a publisher for them, but met with general bafflement or irritation. Fort took back the two manuscripts and, to Dreiser’s dismay, blithely destroyed them, just as he had wiped away his many unpublished novels. Once again, he was off in a new direction, and had lost all interest in anything else.

We know very little about X and Y: mostly tantalising references in letters. But Dreiser did write a one-act play, "The Dream," based on X – probably the first work composed under fortean intoxication.

In this brief – and all but unstageable – sketch, a Professor Cyphers argues his theories with two fellow scientists: all life is "orthogenetically or chemically directed from somewhere… Life is really a dream. We are all an emanation, a shadow, a moving picture cast on a screen of ether." He goes home; goes to bed; and, prompted by the sounds of a thunderstorm and a messenger hammering at his door, dreams that he’s a soldier. He’s killed in the dream; and, as he ponders whether his waking or dreaming state is real, wakes to accept a telegram. He learns that he’s inherited a fortune, which he plans to spend on his research. And that – or at least the first part of it – is our clearest glimpse of what Fort was up to in X. ("The Dream" was published in 1920, in the collection Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub, or a Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life.)

Fort and Dreiser met often for long evenings of talk, beer, and cheese; many of Fort’s surviving letters invite Dreiser up for the next delivery from the brewery. Fort twitted Dreiser about his troubles with censors ("High-priest of evil: Damn it all! [..] what shall I do to be lewd?"); and Dreiser Fort about his obsessive research ("Eat libraries and suffer eventual encyclopedic apoplexy.") 6

Dreiser sometimes kept a journal, and a few entries offer scattered impressions of these convivial evenings. In 1917, Dreiser and his occasional paramour, Estelle Kubitz, celebrated Thanksgiving with the Forts and the Bizozers – a Frenchman, developing a new artificial language, and his wife – at the Forts’ apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City: "Long discussion as to moral or immoral character of Nature – or unmoral. Also importance of man. Also Futurists, American Puritanism, Fort’s work, Bizozer’s, etc." At another dinner a month later, the talk, fuelled by beer, wine, coffee, and mince pie, was even headier: "We dine and talk until 11. Fort describes tenement life. His experiments in psychics. The impression of red and gold in the dark room and the dream of the two birds! The snowy bird emerging from filth!" 7

Dreiser went on to browbeat his publisher into accepting Fort’s next work, The Book of the Damned, before Fort eradicated that one too. And he touted Fort to his fellow writers. Some – like John Cowper Powys – shared his delight. Others did not. HL Mencken judged Fort "enormously ignorant of elementary science"; HG Wells complained that Fort "wrote like a drunkard," and promptly returned his books. 8

But Fort remained an inspiration to Dreiser: a sort of ideal bohemian, absorbed in his work, gifted with a wild and original imagination, sublimely indifferent to poverty. Fort was less influenced by Dreiser – he was apparently incapable of anything as mundane as literary influence – but enjoyed his work, found him a "good old chap", and was grateful for his appreciation. As he wrote shortly before his move to London, "may strange orthogenetic gods destroy me if I ever forget all that was done for me by Theodore Dreiser!" 9

They seem to have drifted apart during Fort’s years in England. They resumed contact in 1931, after Fort had moved back to New York, and was putting the final touches to Lo! "I’m so glad you are alive and that there is another book of yours to read," Dreiser wrote – and joined his fellow enthusiasts in founding the Fortean Society. 10 Fort and Dreiser were photographed together – possibly for the first time – at Dreiser’s home in Mt Kisco, a few months before Fort’s death. Both men look bleary and bloated, and seem none too happy to be out in the air and sunshine. But then, they had probably been up too late the night before, drinking too much beer, eating too much cheese and spinning too many theories about the Universe.