He was a compulsive rewriter of his own work and enlisted the aid of friends, associates, and professional editors in the work of revision. After a manuscript was transformed into a typescript, carbons of it were often circulated among his associates for their editorial suggestions. Many of these copies, in addition to the drafts Dreiser revised himself, are housed in this collection, so it is possible to determine some of the influences on Dreiser's work and to better understand the way Dreiser carried out the process of writing. Correspondence is arranged alphabetically by correspondent and then chronologically within each correspondent's file. Items of incoming and outgoing correspondence are interfiled.
Unidentified correspondence is housed immediately after the alphabetical correspondence files.
The governing criteria for separating correspondence from the alphabetical correspondence file was whether the material in a file was collected primarily by Theodore or Helen Dreiser or by someone else. In organizing the manuscripts in this collection, consideration was given to Dreiser's habits of writing, his own presumed plan or arrangement of his papers, the scope of Penn's actual holdings, and the needs of researchers. The fact that the bulk of this collection has been at the University of Pennsylvania since the late 1940s and was opened to scholars before being completely processed makes Dreiser's own organizational schema difficult to determine in 1990. It is known that even before his papers were shipped to the University of Pennsylvania they were reordered several times by his wife or assistants. It is also known that during the preliminary sorting at Penn related items that had arrived clipped together were separated, and no record was kept of their original arrangement.