Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (/ˈdraɪsər,-zər/;[1] August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of thenaturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice andagency.[2] Dreiser's best-known novels includeSister Carrie (1900) andAn American Tragedy (1925).
Dreiser was born inTerre Haute, Indiana, to John Paul Dreiser and Sarah Maria (née Schanab).[3] John Dreiser was a German immigrant fromMayen in theRhine Province ofPrussia, and Sarah was from theMennonite farming community nearDayton, Ohio. Her family disowned her for converting toRoman Catholicism in order to marry John Dreiser. Theodore was the twelfth of thirteen children (the ninth of the ten surviving).Paul Dresser (1857–1906) was one of his older brothers; Paul changed the spelling of his name as he became a popular songwriter. They were raised as Catholics.
According to Daniels, Dreiser's childhood was characterized by severe poverty. His father could be harsh. His later fiction reflects these experiences.[4]
In 1895, Dreiser convinced business associates of his songwriter brother Paul to give him the editorship of a magazine calledEv'ry Month, in which he published his first story, "Forgotten" a tale based on a song of his brother's titled "The Letter That Never Came".[9] Dreiser continued editing magazines, becoming editor of the women's magazine[10]The Delineator in June 1907. As Daniels noted, he thereby began to achieve financial independence.[11]
During 1899, Dreiser and his first wife Sara stayed with Arthur Henry and his wife Maude Wood Henry at the House of Four Pillars, an 1830sGreek Revival house inMaumee, Ohio.[12] There Dreiser began work on his first novel,Sister Carrie, published in 1900.[13] Unknown to Maude, Arthur sold a half-interest in the house to Dreiser to finance a move to New York without her.[14]
InSister Carrie, Dreiser portrayed a changing society, writing about a young woman who flees rural life for the city (Chicago), fails to find work that pays a living wage, falls prey to several men, and ultimately achieves fame as an actress. The novel sold poorly and was considered controversial because it featured a country girl who pursues her dreams of fame and fortune through relationships with men.[15] The book has acquired a considerable reputation. It has been called byDonald L. Miller the "greatest of all American urban novels."[16]
His second novelJennie Gerhardt was published in 1911.[19]: 44 Dreiser's portrayals of young women as protagonists dramatized the social changes of urbanization, as young people moved from rural villages to cities.
Dreiser's first commercial success wasAn American Tragedy, published in 1925. From 1892, when Dreiser began work as a newspaperman, he had begun
to observe a certain type of crime in the United States that proved very common. It seemed to spring from 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, a form of "murder for money", when "the young ambitious lover of some poorer girl" found "a more attractive girl with money or position" but could not get rid of the first girl, usually because of pregnancy.[20]
Dreiser claimed to have collected such stories every year between 1895 and 1935. He based his novel on details and the setting of the 1906 murder of Grace Brown byChester Gillette in upstate New York, a crime that attracted widespread attention from newspapers.[21] While the novel sold well, it also was criticized for its portrayal of a man without morals who commits a sordid murder.[15]
Though known primarily as a novelist, Dreiser also wrote short stories, publishing his first collection of 11, entitled,Free and Other Stories in 1918.
His story "My Brother Paul" was a biography of his older brotherPaul Dresser, who became a famous songwriter in the 1890s. This story formed the basis for the 1942 romantic movieMy Gal Sal.
Dreiser also wrote poetry. His poem "The Aspirant" (1929) continues his theme of poverty and ambition: a young man in a shabbily furnished room describes his own and the other tenants' dreams, and asks "why? why?" The poem appeared inThe Poetry Quartos, collected and printed byPaul Johnston, and published by Random House in 1929.
Other works includeTrilogy of Desire, based on the life ofCharles Tyson Yerkes (1837–1905), who became a Chicago streetcar tycoon. It is composed ofThe Financier (1912),The Titan (1914), andThe Stoic. The last was published posthumously in 1947.
Dreiser often was forced to battle against censorship because his depiction of some aspects of life, such as sexual promiscuity, offended authorities and challenged popular standards of acceptable opinion.[15] In 1930 he was nominated for theNobel Prize in Literature by Swedish authorAnders Österling, but was passed over by theNobel Committee in favor ofSinclair Lewis.[22]
Dreiser was a committed socialist and wrote several nonfiction books on political issues. These includedDreiser Looks at Russia (1928), the result of his 1927 trip to theSoviet Union, and two books presenting a critical perspective on capitalist America,Tragic America (1931) andAmerica Is Worth Saving (1941).[24] He praised theSoviet Union underJoseph Stalin during theGreat Terror and the non-aggression pact withAdolf Hitler. Dreiser joined theCommunist Party USA in August 1945[25] and later became the honorary president of theLeague of American Writers. Although less politically radical friends, such asH. L. Mencken, spoke of Dreiser's relationship with communism as an "unimportant detail in his life",[19]: 398 Dreiser's biographer Jerome Loving notes that his political activities since the early 1930s had "clearly been in concert with ostensible communist aims with regard to the working class."[19]: 398
While working as a newspaperman in St. Louis, Dreiser met schoolteacher Sara Osborne White. They became engaged in 1893[27] and married on December 28, 1898. They separated in 1909, partly due to Dreiser's infatuation withThelma Cudlipp, the teenage daughter of a colleague, but were never formally divorced.[28]
In 1913, he began a romantic relationship with the actress and painterKyra Markham.[29][30] In 1919, Dreiser met his cousin Helen Patges Richardson (1894–1955) with whom he began an affair.[31] Through the following decades, she remained the constant woman in his life, even through many more temporary love affairs (such as one with his secretary Clara Jaeger in the 1930s).[32] Helen tolerated Dreiser's affairs, and they remained together until his death. Dreiser and Helen married on June 13, 1944,[31] his first wife Sara having died in 1942.[33]
Dreiser planned to return from his first European vacation on theTitanic, but was talked out of it by an English publisher who recommended he board a cheaper ship.[34]
Dreiser had an enormous influence on the generation that followed his. In his tribute "Dreiser" fromHorses and Men (1923),Sherwood Anderson writes (almost repeated 1916 article[36]):
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.[37]
Alfred Kazin characterized Dreiser as "stronger than all the others of his time, and at the same time more poignant; greater than the world he has described, but as significant as the people in it,"[38] while Larzer Ziff (UC Berkeley) remarked that Dreiser "succeeded beyond any of his predecessors or successors in producing a great American business novel."[39]
Renowned mid-century literary criticIrving Howe spoke of Dreiser as ranking "among the American giants, the very few American giants we have had."[40] A British view of Dreiser came from the publisherRupert Hart-Davis: "Theodore Dreiser's books are enough to stop me in my tracks, never mind his letters—that slovenly turgid style describing endless business deals, with a seduction every hundred pages as light relief. If he's the great American novelist, give me theMarx Brothers every time."[41] The literary scholarF. R. Leavis wrote that Dreiser "seems as though he learned English from a newspaper. He gives the feeling that he doesn't have any native language".[42]
One of Dreiser's strongest champions during his lifetime,H. L. Mencken,[43] declared "that he is a great artist, and that no other American of his generation left so wide and handsome a mark upon the national letters. American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and afterDarwin. He was a man of large originality, of profound feeling, and of unshakable courage. All of us who write are better off because he lived, worked, and hoped."[44]
Dreiser's great theme was the tremendous tensions that can arise among ambition, desire, and social mores.[45]
Dreiser Hall, erected 1950 on theIndiana State University campus in Terre Haute, Indiana, houses the University's Communications Programs, Student Media (WISU), Sycamore Video and "The Sycamore" (annual yearbook), classroom and lecture space as well as a 255-seat proscenium theater. It was named for Dreiser in 1966.
Dreiser College, atStony Brook University located in Stony Brook, New York, is also named after him.
In 2011, Dreiser was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.[46]
Moods: Cadenced and Declaimed (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926), 127 poems in a strictly limited edition of 550 numbered copies signed by the author, of which 535 were for sale; revised and enlarged asMoods: Philosophical and Emotional (Cadenced and Declaimed) (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1935)
^Daniels, Howell (1971).The Penguin Companion to Literature 3: USA and Latin America (Avenel 1981 ed.). Penguin Books Ltd. p. 77.
^Lingeman, Richard (1993).Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey (Abridged ed.). Wiley.
^Riggio, Thomas P. (2003).Chronology (appended to Library of America edition of An American Tragedy). New York: Literary Classics of The United States, Inc. pp. 941–943.ISBN978-1-931082-310.
^Riggio, Thomas P. (2004)."Preface". In Rusch, Frederic E.; Pizer, Donald (eds.).Theodore Dreiser: Interviews. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. p. 335.ISBN9780252029431.
^Dreiser, Theodore; National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (1932).Harlan miners speak : report on terrorism in the Kentucky coal fields. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
^Riggio, Thomas P., ed. (2003).Chronology (appended to An American Tragedy). New York: Literary Classics of The United States, Inc. p. 965.ISBN978-1-931082-310.
^Cowie, Alexander, Alfred Kazin, and Charles Shapiro. "The Stature of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Survey of the Man and His Work."American Literature 28.2 (1956): 244. Web. "he turned against his father's orthodox religion and became an atheist."
^Anderson, Sherwood.Dreiser, Little Review, 1916, No. 2 (April), page 5.
^Lyttelton, George (1982). "Letter dated August 30, 1959". In Hart-Davis, Rupert (ed.).The Lyttelton Hart-Davis letters : correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis. Vol. 4. London: John Murray.ISBN978-0-7195-3941-1.
"T.C." Collection: Early works of Theodore Dreiser collected by Walter N. Tobriner and presented to Roger S. Cohen, (115 titles). From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at theLibrary of Congress
