Essays and Addenda: The Author's Other Illustrated Writings.

     While writing-up his version of "the original road trip," the text that would be published as A Hoosier Holiday, Dreiser considered much more than the physical act of having been conveyed from Manhattan to Evansville, Indiana, and so many points in between, by automobile.  Looking out the window of the Pathfinder, and interacting with the residents of so many towns great and small, granted his writer's imagination an opportunity that most people of that era did not have: to compare and contrast the varied conditions, aspirations, and acceptances, of his fellow citizens.  Dreiser's completed manuscript became, to some extent, as much a series of essays on his contemporaries' lives and their wishes as it was a recording of a drive 'cross-country.

     The essays and addenda by this author, too, spring from observations, readings, visits to, and experiences of, various places, as well as a want to simply concentrate some of the thoughts that swirl about otherwise.  I suppose you could say I'm taking a cue from Dreiser; I did add commentary within the "chronicles" of my own road trips of '14 and '15, but having done so, my thoughts have hardly ceased: other occurrences, other visits, further reading/hearing/viewing stories and histories, prompt the addition of yet more written-and-illustrated work.  That I can simply come back and add to the already existing website content certainly makes it fairly easy (and despite some occasional frustrations, I find such avocation enjoyable over-all; if I didn't I wouldn't bother!).

     In short, Dreiser did it, and so I do, too.