Theodore Dreiser, one of the principal exponents of naturalism in
American literature, was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on August
27, 1871, into a large family of German ancestry. He endured a
rootless upbringing as his parents moved their ten children to
different towns in search of employment. Along the way Dreiser
received an erratic education in various parochial and public
schools; he read voraciously from an early age and was largely
self-taught. He began his writing career in 1892 as a cub reporter
for the Chicago Daily Globe, an experience he recalled in A Book
About Myself (1922; republished as Newspaper Days in 1931), and
later wrote for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Pittsburgh
Dispatch. His years as a journalist proved instrumental in
developing the exhaustively detailed style that is the hallmark of
his fiction. In 1894 Dreiser arrived in New York City and became
editor of Ev'ry Month, a moderately successful literary magazine.
Encouraged by a publishing colleague, he turned out short stories
and entertained thoughts about writing a novel.
In October 1899 Dreiser inscribed two words-'Sister Carrie'-on a
clean sheet of paper and proceeded to compose a breakthrough work
that propelled American literature into the twentieth century. 'I
have found a masterpiece . . . it must be published,' said Frank
Norris, a reader for Doubleday, Page and Company, to whom Dreiser
submitted the manuscript. (The firm had just brought out Norris's
novel McTeague, another unretouched picture of American life.)
Despite the strong objections of senior partner Frank Doubleday,
who detested the book and refused to promote it, Sister Carrie was
published on November 8, 1900. The reviews were violently adverse,
and the novel sold poorly. Genteel readers perceived the unsparing
story of Caroline Meeber's rise to riches as a direct affront to
the standards by which respectable Americans claimed to live.
'Ultimately, what shocked the world in Dreiser's work was not so
much the things that he presented as the fact that he himself was
not shocked by them,' observed Robert Penn Warren.
The commercial failure of Sister Carrie forced Dreiser to abandon
fiction temporarily, and over the next decade he occupied editorial
positions on several popular magazines. With the encouragement of
H. L. Mencken, one of his most persistent defenders and promoters,
Dreiser eventually resumed writing. His second novel, Jennie
Gerhardt, was both a commercial and a popular success when it
appeared in 1911, though many regarded this frank story about the
sexual experiences of a young girl as a threat to moral standards.
After its publication Dreiser pledged all of his creative energy to
literature, writing The Financier (1912), a story about the rise of
an unscrupulous tycoon, which became the first book in a trilogy
that included The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947).
Dreiser's next novel, The 'Genius' (1915), a highly
autobiographical work portraying the artist as Nietzschean superman
who lives beyond conventional moral codes, was threatened with
censorship. The successful campaign to save it from suppression
proved a pivotal victory in the fight for American literary
freedom. During this period Dreiser also wrote two engaging
memoirs, A Traveler at Forty (1913) and A Hoosier Holiday (1916); a
compendium of philosophical essays, Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1920); two
volumes of drama, Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural (1916)
and The Hand of the Potter (1919); as well as several collections
of short stories, sketches, and articles, including Free and Other
Stories (1918), Twelve Men (1919), and The Color of a Great City
(1923).
The publication of An American Tragedy in 1925 established Dreiser
as the foremost American novelist of his time. Based on newspaper
accounts of a sensational murder case, the work was dramatized on
Broadway and sold to Paramount Pictures, which released a film
version in 1931. Yet afterward Dreiser virtually abandoned the
novel as an art form. He composed two books of poetry, Moods,
Cadenced and Declaimed (1926) and The Aspirant (1929). He also
wrote Chains (1927), a second volume of short stories, and A
Gallery of Women (1929), a collection of biographical sketches.
Dawn, another work of autobiography, came out in 1931.
Dreiser became increasingly preoccupied with philosophical and
political issues during the last two decades of his life. Two
volumes of essays, Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928) and Tragic
America (1932), reflect his growing involvement with socialism.
America Is Worth Saving (1941), the last book Dreiser published
during his lifetime, announced his complete conversion to
Communism. In 1944, the year before his death, he was honored with
an Award of Merit by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Theodore Dreiser died of a heart attack at his home in Hollywood on
December 28, 1945. His two last novels, The Bulwark (1946) and The
Stoic (1947), appeared soon afterward, along with The Best Short
Stories of Theodore Dreiser (1947).
Several works drawn from Dreiser's unpublished papers and diaries
appeared in later years, notably Letters of Theodore Dreiser
(1959), Theodore Dreiser- A Selection of Uncollected Prose (1977),
American Diaries, 1902-1926 (1982), and An Amateur Laborer (1983).
Three volumes of his early journalism were also issued
posthumously- Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser
(1985), Journalism, Volume One (1988), and Theodore Dreiser's
'Heard in the Corridors' Articles and Related Writings (1988).
'Dreiser more than any other man, marching alone, usually
unappreciated, often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian
timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness
and passion of life,' concluded Sinclair Lewis.
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