Theodore Dreiser

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Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1933
Born	August 27 1871(1871-08-27) Terre Haute, Indiana
Died	December 28 1945 (aged 74) Hollywood, California
Occupation	novelist
Spouse	Sara White
Parents	Sarah and John Paul Dreiser

Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27 1871 – December 28 1945) was an American author of the naturalist school, known for dealing with the gritty reality of life.

He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Sarah and John Paul Dreiser, a strict Baptist. John Paul Dreiser was a German immigrant and Sarah was from the Mennonite farming community near Dayton, Ohio; she was disowned for marrying John and converting to Roman Catholicism. Theodore was the twelfth of thirteen children (the ninth of the ten surviving). The popular songwriter Paul Dresser (1859–1906) was his older brother.

From 1889 – 1890, Theodore attended Indiana University before flunking out. Within several years, he was writing for the Chicago Globe newspaper and then the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. After proposing in 1893, he married Sara White on December 28 1898. They ultimately separated in 1909, but were never formally divorced.

Image:Theodore Dreiser 1918.jpg

Dreiser in 1918

His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), tells the story of a woman who flees her country life for the city (Chicago) and falls into a wayward life. The publisher did little to promote the book, and it sold poorly.

His second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was published the following year. Many of Dreiser's subsequent novels dealt with social inequality. Though primarily known as a novelist, Dreiser published his first collection of short stories, Free and Other Stories in 1918. The collection contained 9 stories. His first commercial success was An American Tragedy (1925), which was made into a film in 1931 and again in 1951. In 1892, when Dreiser began work as a newspaperman he “began to observe a certain type of crime in the United States that proved very common. It seemed to spring form the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown ambition to be somebody financially and socially.” “Fortune hunting became a disease” with the frequent result of a peculiarly American kind of crime “many forms of murder for money. . . the young ambitious lover of some poorer girl . . . (for) a more attractive girl with money or position . . . it was not always possible to drop the first girl. What usually stood in the way was pregnancy.” Dreiser claimed to have collected such stories every year between 1895 and 1935. The murder in 1911 of Avis Linnell by Clarence Richeson particularly caught his attention. By 1919 this murder was the basis of one of two separate novels begun by Dreiser. The 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette eventually became the basis for “An American Tragedy.”^[1]

Other works include The Genius and Trilogy of Desire (a three-parter composed of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic). The latter was published posthumously in 1947.

Dreiser had an enormous influence on the generation that followed his. In his tribute "Dreiser" from Horses and Men (1923), Sherwood Anderson writes:

Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick some of his books to pieces, to laugh at him for so much of his heavy prose ... [T]he fellows of the ink-pots, the prose writers in America who follow Dreiser, will have much to do that he has never done. Their road is long but, because of him, those who follow will never have to face the road through the wilderness of Puritan denial, the road that Dreiser faced alone.

Humorist Corey Ford (writing as "John Riddell") quipped that Dreiser had only one plot: Boy meets Girl = Tragedy. F. R. Leavis remarked that Dreiser wrote as if he did not have a native language.

Renowned mid-century literary critic Irving Howe spoke of Dreiser as "among the American giants, one of the very few American giants we have had."

Politically, Dreiser was involved in several campaigns against social injustice. This included the lynching of Frank Little, one of the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the deportation of Emma Goldman, and the conviction of the trade union leader Tom Mooney.

Dreiser, a committed socialist, wrote several non-fiction books on political issues. These included Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), the result of his 1927 trip to the Soviet Union, Tragic America (1931) and America is Worth Saving (1941). His vision of capitalism and a future world order with a strong American military dictate combined with the harsh criticism of the latter made him unpopular within the official circles. He died December 28, 1945 in Hollywood, aged 74.

Published as

Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men (Richard Lehan, ed.) (Library of America, 1987) ISBN 978-0-94045041-7.

An American Tragedy (Thomas P. Riggio, ed.) (Library of America, 2003) ISBN 978-1-93108231-0.

References

^ Fishkin, Shelley Fisher (1988). From Fact to Fiction. Oxford University Press.

Cassuto, Leonard and Clare Virginia Eby, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Loving, Jerome. The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.