“There once lived a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper’s son, who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune” (opening line).
Steven Millhauser’s bildungsroman, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and finalist for the 1996 National Book Award, is a charming, at times dreamy, surrealist novel that portrays the unhampered rise of a young entrepreneurial visionary in the late 19th century. Martin Dressler, the son of a New York cigar shopkeeper, manages to establish himself and become one of the pre-eminent hoteliers in the city (despite never receiving an education beyond the eighth grade). Martin Dressler offers a wholly unique investigation into the idea of the American Dream, a cultural concept that is likened to a fable or fairy-tale in the novel.
Martin Dressler is a novel filled with vivid imagery rife with warmth, fantasy, and nostalgia: “This was toward the end of the nineteenth century when on any streetcorner in America some ordinary-looking citizen who was destined to invent a new kind of bottlecap or tin can, start a chain of five-cent stores, sell a faster and better elevator, or open a fabulous new department store with big display windows made possible by an improved process for manufacturing sheets of glass. Although Martin Dressler was a shopkeeper’s son, he too dreamed his dream, and at last he was lucky enough to do what few people even dare to imagine: he satisfied his heart’s desire. But this is a perilous privilege, which the gods watch jealously, waiting for the flaw, the little flaw, that brings everything to ruin, in the end” (1-2).
As the story begins, New York City is a rich, bustling world filled with ambitious, industrious businessmen. On the streets there are milk wagons and inside the hotels there are mahogany desks. This is a dreamworld apparently devoid of any social ills like poverty or disease. Martin Dressler begins the novel at age nine, his father, Otto Dressler, owns Dressler’s Cigar and Tobacco. One day, young Martin sets up a small tobacco arrangement with Charley Stratemeyer, a young man who works as a day clerk at the fabulous Vanderlyn Hotel. From here, Martin makes a name for himself and soon takes a job as a bellboy at the Vanderlyn where he meets all manner of interesting and amusing characters, such as Little Alice Bell, a “lobby orphan,” whom he is asked to watch (as thanks she and her mother give Martin chocolates and a locket before departing for Boston). Another memorable character is an older voluptuous woman named Louise Hamilton who is staying in room 411. She somewhat shockingly gives Martin his first sexual experience (a strange and unexpected chapter in my view), and Martin never truly forgets the silk smoothness of her skin.
As to be expected, Martin quickly rises in the ranks at the Vanderlyn Hotel from bellhop to day clerk, working front desk and eventually being offered managerial roles. Amidst his promotions, Martin is ceaselessly fascinated by the order and inner workings of the hotel, from the basement to the lobby. As a reliable and ambitious young man, he also starts a new café business in partnership with Wilhelm “Bill” Baer, the twenty-year-old son of Gustav Baer, a cigarmaker on Forsyth Street in the old neighborhood. He leases a space in the Vanderlyn before expanding his café chain elsewhere in the city. He then acquires a string of lunchrooms and starts to develop a grand vision for a new space to serve customers. He buys the old Paradis Musee wax museum in partnership with Walter Dundee in the hopes of developing a metropolitan lunchroom and billiards parlor, which later balloons into a “little idea” to create a vast city within a city, a surreal space filled with all the modern luxuries and amenities, but also an aesthetic feeling of something traditional, old-fashioned, and even fantastical, like an old forest from a Germanic fairy-tale.
As he makes more money, Martin takes up a fancy residence at the Bellingham where he quickly meets a widow and her two daughters: golden-haired Caroline Vernon who always seems fatigued, distant, and mysterious; and plain-looking Emmeline Vernon who is energetic and full of life. Somewhat accidentally, Martin finds himself courting Caroline and eventually marrying her. However, on their wedding night Caroline seems entirely uninterested in him (no one has ever explained the birds and the bees to her) so instead on his own wedding night, Martin pays a visit to Marie Haskova, an ambiguous, almost ghostly, immigrant maid in the hotel who reappears from time to time throughout the novel as an object of Martin’s sexual desire (perhaps not unlike the women he encountered in New York brothels). Eventually, Caroline obediently but joylessly fulfills her nightly duty to Martin, but something is clearly not right in the marriage.
At any rate, Martin’s marital frustration is contrasted with his meteoric rise as a hotelier. He makes his elaborate, outrageous vision come to life by opening a cohort of new hotels in the city, each more ornate and colossal than the last. He buys the Vanderlyn on a quarter-million-dollar bank loan with the intent to undertake major renovations. Then he builds a vast hotel dubbed the Dressler, this is followed by the New Dressler, and then finally the Grand Cosmo. Each opening is covered extensively in the press, outfitted with electrical amenities and other conveniences designed to please and awe guests, but the crown jewel of the Grand Cosmo is a vast underground ‘city within a city,’ a Las Vegas of sorts complete with rows of shops, artificial parks, gardens, a running waterfall and so on –an artificial capitalist utopia filled with everything money can buy, where guests can live at ease and escape from the harshness of the world. It is a twisted superficial mirror of the real world that seems to know no limits, with rumors abounding as to how far it actually goes down below the city and what mysterious pleasures it might contain therein. It brings to mind a fantastical Disneyland theme park for adults where everything has been designed to thrill and capture an imagined vanished past.
But what goes up eventually comes back down, and such is the case for Martin’s Grand Cosmo Hotel. It spectacularly fails shortly after opening on September 5, 1905 (five days after his thirty-fifth birthday), leaving Martin completely in the lurch. As he walks around the city, Martin starts to grow superstitious and ponderous as his reality seems to blend with his dream in a hazy state of confusion. Did the Grand Cosmo truly fail? Was it ever even constructed in the first place? Ghostly surrealist visions start entering his consciousness –memories of the Old Tecumseh statue that once stood outside his father’s cigar shop, recollections of the old manager of the Vanderlyn Hotel, Alexander Westerhoven, the phantasmic women from his past like Gerda the Swede, Marie Haskova, and Mrs. Louise Hamilton, as well as business associates like Richard Arlington, the Viennese architect, or Mr. Harwinton, the advertising guru. The novel ends on a tragic note as Martin’s vision apparently comes crumbling down, wrecked, perhaps, by the weight of its own absurdity. However, we never truly feel quite sorry for Martin. He remains an elusive character, almost a superficial caricature, a distant and static figure designed to artfully construct this fable. As readers, we never actually get close enough to Martin to feel his joy or suffer his pain.
And perhaps this is partly the idea that Steven Millhauser intends for us to explore in Martin Dressler: the notion that we, as readers, often have a caricatured and carnival-esque cultural view of the American Dream. At first, we eagerly watched Martin’s rise from obscurity, gratifying ourselves with his familiar Horatio Alger story, the tale of a cigar shopkeep’s son who rises from obscurity to become the city’s leading hotel magnate. It is exactly the kind of yarn that politicians are always spinning: a one-dimensional narrative about a material rise from poverty for the benefit of the general public, with Martin Dressler serving as an Ayn Randian John Galt of sorts. Yet we later come to realize Martin’s story only exists in the realm of the surreal. It is a vague dream of limitless expansion, with minimal constraint, and a myriad opposing dichotomies (especially the tension between nostalgia and novelty as displayed in Martin’s hotels). There is inconsistency, and even impossibility, in fully capturing the scope of Martin’s imagination. By situating Martin squarely in the Gilded Age boom of the late 19th century, Millhauser distances us from the story, transporting readers back in time to a hundred years earlier at the dawn of the industrial age, wherein the mythos of the American Dream was first born; a fabled past where people had perfect freedom to fulfill even their most indulgent whims. Of course, we do not see any dirt-poor children working in factories, elderly people dying in poor houses, or smoky pollution filling the urban skies. There is only room for a rosy, fond, warm, pining portrait of optimistic entrepreneurship in the late 19th century. Of course, Martin Dressler would be a simplistic Horatio Alger-styled novel if not for its dip into postmodern anti-realism as the novel comes to a close. This descent into irreality reveals that Martin Dressler is not merely a safe, conservative rags-to-riches novel, but rather a complex postmodern examination of the American Dream.
One aspect of the novel I found a bit befuddling was Martin’s love life. He sleeps with various hotel guests as a young man and later marries a cold fish, Caroline, before steadily going into business with her sister, Emmeline. He always wonders if he married the wrong sister. Then everything changes when Caroline’s friend, Claire Moore, gives Caroline a gun which she fires in a jealous fit of rage squarely at her sister (only narrowly missing her). From this point onward, Emmeline and Caroline take a backseat in the story, nearly disappearing entirely. In many ways, the strange arc of Martin’s various romantic relationships parallel his enormous, bloated business vision. A more conventional novel might see Martin and Emmeline running off into the sunset happily ever after, since they are obviously the better match, but Martin Dressler is a more challenging than comforting novel. In the end, both Martin’s dream and his marriage end in disaster. Perhaps in some ways Caroline is a reflection of Martin’s bottomless desire for what is actually unattainable. He spends much of the novel in an endless void of yearning for things like massive hotels complete with subterranean cities, while at the same time, pursuing a forlorn, demure, detached woman who remains infinitely distant and somehow never fully attainable. Maybe Martin’s unrestrained imagination is a dangerous thing after all.
Notable Quotations:
“There once lived a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper’s son, who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune” (opening line).
“This was toward the end of the nineteenth century when on any streetcorner in America some ordinary-looking citizen who was destined to invent a new kind of bottlecap or tin can, start a chain of five-cent stores, sell a faster and better elevator, or open a fabulous new department store with big display windows made possible by an improved process for manufacturing sheets of glass. Although Martin Dressler was a shopkeeper’s son, he too dreamed his dream, and at last he was lucky enough to do what few people even dare to imagine: he satisfied his heart’s desire. But this is a perilous privilege, which the gods watch jealously, waiting for the flaw, the little flaw, that brings everything to ruin, in the end” (1-2).
“Here at the end of the line, here at the world’s ends, the world didn’t end: iron piers stretched out over the ocean, iron towers pierced the sky, somewhere under the water a great telegraph cable longer than the longest train stretched past sunken ships and octopuses all the way to England –and Martin had the odd sensation, as he stood quietly in the lifting and falling waves, that the world, immense and extravagant, was rushing away in every direction: behind him the fields were rolling into Brooklyn and Brooklyn was rushing into the river, before him the waves repeated themselves all the way to the hazy shimmer of the horizon, in the river between the two cities the bridge piers went down through the water bottom halfway to China, while up in the sky elevators rose higher and higher until they became invisible in the hot blue summer haze” (16-17).
“Wasn’t America the land of opportunity? And wasn’t the Vanderleyn Hotel a golden opportunity?” (20).
“From his bench in the lobby he would watch the morning grow brighter, hear the world fill with the sounds of the day: the jingling bells and grinding wheels of the Broadway horsecars, the rattle of dishes in the dining room, the clank of a maid’s bucket on the marble stairs. As the day grew brighter and louder Martin felt himself filling with light and sound, so that by noon he was ready to burst with energy. Sometimes after changing back into his clothes, he sat for a few minutes in a soft chair in the main lobby and took it all in: the people walking about or takng taking their ease, the shiny mahogany desks in the writing rooms, laughter in the ladies’ parlor, the gilt hexagons on the ceiling, the great marble stairway” (24).
“What irked him was the idea of partnership itself, for he had wanted to do something on his own steam” (65).
“…Martin thought of iron El trestles winding and stretching across the city, of department store windows and hotel lobbies, of electric elevators and streetcar ads, of the city pressing its way north on both sides of the great park, of dynamos and electric lights, of ten-story hotels, of the old iron tower near the depot at West Brighton with its two steam-driven elevators rising and falling in the sky –and in his blood he felt a surge of restlessness, as if he were a steam train spewing fiery coalsmoke into the black night sky as he roared along a trembling El track, high above the dark storefronts, the gaslit saloons, the red-lit doorways, the cheap beer dives, the dance halls, the gambling joints, the face in the doorway, the sudden cry in the night” (71).
“Row houses were springing up left and right, but the future, Martin told them, lay up in the sky –in apartment houses and family hotels, in grand multiple dwellings” (93).
“The original idea for converting the Paradise Musee into a lunchroom and billiard parlor had come out of nowhere –it ad been an impulse, a whim—but hr was convinced that he could about things in a clear-headed orderly way. Martin knew what attracted him wasn’t the actual lunchroom, for he had no passion for lunchrooms, no special fondness for them, in a sense no interest in them; his passion was for working things out, bringing things together, arranging the unarrangeable, making combinations” (123).
“‘But what do you want, Martin? What is it you actually want?
‘Oh, everything,’ he said, lightly without a smile.
‘But I don’t think you do, not in the usual way. In a way you don’t want anything. You don’t care if you’re rich. Suppose you were rich, really rich. What would you do then?’” (132).
“For it was Harwinton’s belief that every city dweller harbored a double desire: the desire to be in the thick of things, and the equal and opposite desire to escape the horrible thick of things to some peaceful rural place with shady paths, murmuring streams, and the hum of bumblebees over vaguely imagined flowers” (211).
“He had slipped out of his life, he had passed through a crack in the world, into this place” (292).
The 1997 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1997 Pulitzer Fiction jury consisted of one prior Pulitzer Prize winner (Anne Tyler) and two academics, one of whom was a returning fiction juror (Frank McConnell):
- Chair: Anne Tyler (1941-present) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 for her novel Breathing Lessons. She was also a runner-up in 1986 for her novel The Accidental Tourist, and in 1983 for her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Additionally, her novel Earthly Possessions was mentioned in the jury report in 1978. She previously served on the fiction in 1985 when Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie won; in 1991 when Rabbit at Rest by John Updike won; in 1993 when A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler won. Click here for my brief biography of Anne Tyler.
- Frank D. McConnell (1942-1999) was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame summa cum laude in 1964, then went on to Yale University where he received his M.A. in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1968 with a dissertation on Wordsworth’s The Prelude under the direction of Harold Bloom. He taught English at Cornell University (1967-1971), and Northwestern University (1971-1981). He joined the English faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 1982 where he would teach for 16 years. He published several books including The Confessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude, The Spoken Seen: Film and the Romantic Imagination, Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth and Pynchon, Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature, and The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells. After arriving in California, McConnell published a series of detective novels about a nun who inherits her father’s investigative agency (Murder Among Friends, Blood Lake, The Front King, and Liar’s Poker). He wrote a regular humorous column in the Catholic journal Commonweal. Upon his death in 1999, the University of California wrote an In Memoriam: “With Frank McConnell’s death on 17 January 1999, the UCSB Department of English lost its most popular undergraduate teacher. With lectures at once passionate and irreverent, often ribald, he held classes of five to seven hundred students spellbound on subjects as diverse as science fiction and Shakespeare. His colleagues knew him as prodigiously wide in his learning–as well as brilliantly witty, always ready with a comic story of sharp quip.” He was a Guggenheim fellow, a Fulbright professor in Germany, and served on several Pulitzer Prize for Fiction juries (twice as chair). He was married twice, divorced once, and was survived by two sons when he died in 1999.
- R.H.W. Dillard, or Richard Henry Wilde Dillard (1937-2023) was an American poet, author, critic, and translator. He was a professor of English and chair of the creative writing program at Hollins University for some 59 years (he also taught classes on film and wrote pieces of film criticism). He received his BA from Roanoke College and an MA and PhD from the University of Virginia. He won many awards for his short stories, essays, and poetry collections (his writing was influential on many students, as well as both of his ex-wives Cathryn Hankla and Annie Dillard, who won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Richard Dillard died in Roanoke, Virginia on April 4, 2023 at the age of 85.
As chair, Anne Tyler’s submitted the fiction jury report to Seymour Topping (then Pulitzer Prize Administrator) on December 28, 1996. It identified three nominations for the Pulitzer Prize: Unlocking the Air and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser, and The Manikin by Joanna Scott. Additionally, the jury enclosed a minority report by R.H.W. Dillard respectfully requesting a fourth consideration for the Pulitzer Prize: The King of Babylon Has Not Come For You by George Garrett.
Of Martin Dressler, the jury wrote the following three paragraph assessment for the Pulitzer Board to consider:
“Steven Millhauser’s subtle, elegantly-crafted novel is a number of things: a meditation on the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: a witty, compassionate parable about capitalism, technology, and the imagination; a poignant reexamination of the ‘American dream’ –absolute democracy coupled with universal individual nobility—in all its soaring aspiration and all its melancholy. But above all it is a wonderfully inventive tale, told with enviable skill.”
“As Martin rises from apprentice in his father’s cigar store to hotel manager to hotel builder to restaurant mogul to, finally, builder of a fantastic, self-enclosed city-within-a-city –the “Grand Cosmo”– the reader grows more and more aware that Martin’s visionary entrepreneurism is a metaphor for one of this century’s crucial problems: the desire to retain traditional values of civilization and grace within the anonymity of mass culture. The ending, where Martin literally is absorbed into his own vision, is heartbreakingly intelligent and inevitable: it could well become one of the touchstone scenes in modern American literature.”
“Written with disarming, ‘realistic’ directness, Martin Dressler can fool you. You think you’re reading an imitation of late-nineteenth century fiction, until you realize that the tale itself is taking the style into an ever more suggestive interzone where dream, reality, history, aspiration and heroic loss meet, mingle, and dance. This is an extraordinary book, and could come to be regarded as a classic.”
Who is Steven Millhauser?
Steven Millhauser (1943-present) was born in New York City and grew up in Connecticut. He earned his BA from Columbia University (1965) and later pursued a doctorate in English at Brown University, though he never completed his dissertation (he wrote parts of his novels Edwin Mullhouse and From the Realm of Morpheus at Brown).
Prior to winning the Pulitzer Prize, Mullhauser was perhaps best known for his 1972 novel Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, a parodic literary biography of a ten-year-old aspiring writer who dies young as told through the eyes of his best friend. He has since published three more novels, three novellas, seven short story collections, and other literary and nonfiction works. His short story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis for the 2006 film starring Edward Norton The Illusionist.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Millhauser has also won the Lannan Award, the Story Prize, and the World Fantasy Award, among other accolades.
He taught at Skidmore College for nearly thirty years, retiring in 2017. He and his ex-wife, Cathy Allis, have two children: Anna and Jonathan. As of the time of this writing, Millhauser reportedly resides in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Film Adaptations:
- None.
Further Reading:
- Edwin Mullhouse: the life and death of an American writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972) by Steven Millhauser
Literary Context 1996-1997
- 1996 Nobel Prize Winner: awarded to the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”
- 1996 National Book Award Winner: Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett
- 1996 Booker Prize Winner: Last Orders by Graham Swift
- According to Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1996 was The Runaway Jury by John Grisham. Other notable bestsellers that year included Executive Orders by Tom Clancy, Desperation by Stephen King, Airframe by Michael Crichton, The Tenth Insight by James Redfield (the second book in the Celestine Prophecies series).
- In 1996, a string of American classics like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and some 30 others were banned from an English reading list in Lindale, Texas under the justification that they “conflict with the values of the community.”
- Primary Colors: a novel of politics (a story about Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign) by Anonymous (later identified as columnist Joe Klein) was published.
- Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood was published.
- Excession, the fifth book in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks was published.
- Sex and the City by columnist Candace Bushnell was published.
- Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding was published.
- John Gardner published Cold, his sixteenth and final James Bond continuation novel.
- Stephen King published his classic The Green Mile along with two other novels.
- Michael P. Kube-McDowell published a trio of Star Wars novels as did Michael Stackpole.
- John le Carré published The Tailor of Panama.
- Joyce Carol Oates published We Were the Mulvaneys.
- Chuck Palahniuk published Fight Club.
- Jeff Shaara published Gods and Generals, a prequel to his father’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels.
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace was published.
- The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks was published.
- Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer was published.
- Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt was published.
- The first book in K.A. Applegate’s young adult Animorphs series was published.
- George R. R. Martin published A Game of Thrones.
Did the Right Book Win?
I was admittedly quite charmed with Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, though I am still wrestling with its deeper meaning. I feel as though I may be merely scratching the surface with some of my reflections above. At any rate, I am also interested in one day diving into one of the finalists this year: Unlocking the Air and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, but in general I’d say the Pulitzer Board and jury made the right decision in selecting Martin Dressler this year.
Millhauser, Steven. Martin Dressler: The Tale of American Dreamer. Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc. New York, New York, 1996. The novel is dedicated to Millhauser’s sister Carla.
Click here to return to my survey of the Pulitzer Prize winners.