Dreiser's contentious relationship with book publishers and movie producers began in 1900 with his first book, Sister Carrie, and continued unabated throughout his career. (His only satisfactory association of any note was with his English publisher, Constable, and its editor Otto Kyllmann, and even that collapsed in 1939 over Dreiser's Anglophobia of that period.) Publishers were in business to sell books, as Thomas H. McKee of Doubleday, Page reminded Robert Elias in his 1949 recollection of the Sister Carrie controversy; Dreiser wrote ungainly novels with subjects and themes that challenged conventional morals and beliefs. To bridge this large gap, there was a need for compromise, a state of mind foreign to Dreiser's self-conception of his nature and role as an artist. He was a trailblazer, as he was constantly reminded by his fellow writers once the “suppression” of Sister Carrie reached mythic status, and trailblazers cut a wide path of their own choosing. He was also, as the convoluted history of The Bulwark makes clear, an unreliable supplier of the goods for sale. The novel was conceived in 1912, announced by several publishers over the remainder of Dreiser's life, and was finally published posthumously.

Dreiser's deep-seated suspicion of the middlemen necessary to bring his work to the public was strengthened from the mid-1920s onward by the facts that New York-based publishing firms were increasingly Jewish owned and that the film industry was almost completely Jewish controlled. He believed, for example, that his quarrel with Horace Liveright in 1926 over the sale of the film rights of An American Tragedy to Jesse Lasky of the Famous Players–Lasky film company derived from a conspiracy by a Jewish publisher and a Jewish film magnate to cheat him. For the rest of his life his instinctive suspicion of Jewish businessmen on the one hand and publishers and film company owners on the other mutually reinforced one another.

Dreiser's professional career as a writer thus accurately reflects the man. As Helen Dreiser comments several times in her account of her life with Dreiser, and as H. L. Mencken notes as well in relation to his and Dreiser's struggle against the suppression of The “Genius,” Dreiser knew his own mind and was not inclined to accept deviations from the road he wished to take, whatever the consequences.