This encyclopedia provides undergraduate- and graduate-level students with a guide to Dreiser's 24 books, more than 870 magazine and newspaper articles, stories, poems, and essays. There are entries for each of his books and stories, selected articles, and other genres in which he wrote as well as for his major influences; people, places, and events in his life; and the literary and social contexts of his works. Almost 70 academic contributors supplied the 279 entries, which are enumerated at the beginning of the encyclopedia, followed by a list of abbreviations and a chronology of Dreiser's life from his birth in 1871 to the formation of the International Theodore Dreiser Society in 1991. The entries vary in length from one paragraph on Stewart Barnes, a character in The Bulwark, to some that cover several pages, such as that for A Hoosier Holiday, "the first 'automobile road book'." Each entry ends with a suggested reading list. The selected bibliography lists Dreiser's books, volumes in the University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition, and miscellaneous collections by him, followed by lists of biographical and critical secondary works.