Theodore Dreiser
The son of a German immigrant, Dreiser was the ninth of 10
children and
grew up in poverty. He spent a year at Indiana University
before
becoming a newspaper reporter in 1892. His reading
(especially of T. H.
Huxley, John Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer) and personal
experiences led him to a pessimistic view of human
helplessness in the face of instinct and social forces.
The initial failure of his first novel, Sister
Carrie
(1900), the story of a kept woman whose behavior goes
unpunished,
plunged him into depression, but he recovered and achieved
financial
success as editor in chief of several women's magazines
until he was
forced to resign in 1910 because of his involvement with an
assistant's
daughter.
In 1911 his second novel, Jennie Gerhardt,
was published. It was followed in 1912 by The
Financier, and in 1914 by The Titan, two volumes
in a projected trilogy based on the life of the
transportation magnate Charles T. Yerkes.
The 'Genius' (1915), a sprawling
semiautobiographical chronicle of Dreiser's numerous love
affairs, was censured by the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice. Its sequel, The Bulwark,
appeared posthumously in 1946.
In 1925 he published his first novel in a decade, An
American Tragedy.
Based on a celebrated murder case, it brought him a degree
of critical
and commercial success he had never before attained. Its
highly
critical view of the American legal system made him the
adopted
champion of social reformers. Though a visit to the Soviet
Union had
left him skeptical about communism, the Great Depression
caused him to
reconsider his opposition. His autobiographical Dawn
(1931) is one of the most candid self-revelations by any
major writer. He completed most of The Stoic,
the long-postponed third volume of his trilogy on Yerkes,
in the weeks
before his death. His other works include short stories,
plays, and
essays.
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Series
Books:American Tragedy, August 2000
Trade Size (reprint)
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