Dreiser lived in many homes other than the four described in this section. But his Greenwich Village and 57th Street apartments and his Westchester County and West Los Angeles houses are the most distinctive of his many dwellings. They also have the advantage of full descriptions by others, principally his lovers.

The four homes included here mirror the general character of Dreiser's life over its last three decades. His makeshift and arty Greenwich Village apartment reflected both his financial insecurity and his radical life-style during this period. After An American Tragedy made him rich, his homes began to reflect his new-found wealth—a handsome townhouse (in his case, a duplex apartment) in the most stylish part of town and a large estate in the country. And, during his Los Angeles years, his handsome house on Kings Road, located near several film studios, reflected his strong interest in the film industry during this final phase of his life.

Wherever he lived, Dreiser was accompanied by objects that constituted a degree of continuity—a rocking chair, a group of fauve-inspired nudes, and his brother Paul's piano converted into a writing desk—each of which made manifest a permanent element in the otherwise peripatetic life of its owner.

Dreiser rented a Greenwich Village ground floor apartment at 165 West 10th Street in July 1914 and remained there until October 1919, when he moved to Los Angeles. For the first two years he shared the apartment with Kirah Markham.

Louise Campbell

Letters to Louise: Theodore Dreiser's Letters to Louise Campbell

I happened to be in New York about a month later and called on him. The shabby red-brick row house in Greenwich Village seemed to me at the time the perfect environment for a writer. He answered my ring of the doorbell and led me through the vestibule into a fairly large room on the first floor front. The first thing I noticed was a very large desk standing before one of the two front windows. He explained later it had once been a square piano and he'd had the inside workings removed. I was to see that desk throughout the following years in every workroom that Dreiser occupied. A bowl filled with oranges stood on top of it.