ABSTRACT
From places like Columbia City, Wisconsin, or Terre Haute, Indiana, Dreiser’s own hometown, immigrants streamed into cities around the world, making urban life a fundamentally new and increasingly commonly shared experience at the turn of the twentieth century. Portrayals of urban life repeatedly and pointedly described the dangers of city traffic. In the United States, city people from all social stations went to baseball games that were organized around city-centered teams. Portrayals of urban life repeatedly and pointedly described the dangers of city traffic. In the United States, the newly platted city streets were generally wide enough to accommodate the new traffic, but the railroad lines circumscribed the direction of growth.
