In this volume of reminiscences and correspondence, Theodore Dreiser's literary secretary and lover, the late Marguerite Tjader, re-created her professional and personal experiences with the novelist and many of his noted contemporaries. Along the narrative way, she also speaks about her editorship of the important left-wing magazine Direction during the late thirties and early forties. Her memoir is edited, prefaced, and endnoted by Dreiser scholar Lawrence E.

Hussman (Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest). Also included are Dreiser's and Tjader's contributions to Direction. This book should establish once and for all that Dreiser was not the womanizer of myth but a thoughtful and sensitive lover, as well as one of the United States' greatest writers.