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.