THEODORE DREISER
(1871-1945)
Theodore Dreiser is one of the greatest American realistic writers of modern times.
Born into a poor family in the state of Indiana, Th. Dreiser left home to earn his living when he was sixteen years old.He was eager to study , buy money difficulties obliged him to start working at a very early age.
Before coming a
writer , he did various odd jobs , which enabled him to know men and life in the U.S.A.Everything convinced him of the ever sharpening social
injustice.It was the end of the 19th. century and the beginning of the 20th.century when the capitalist system was making its rapid advance to the imperialistic stage.
The misery of the masses was growing worse and worse , the precipice deepened between the rich , the monopoly businessmen and the exploited , steadily impoverished masses.It was the time when the system itself was ever more threatened by the growing working class movement .
At the beginning of his literary career Th. Dreiser wrote sketches and articles which the bourgeois papers often refused because he tried to speak about the
sufferings of the exploited people.From 1889-1890, Theodore attended Indiana University before flunking out. Within several years, he was writing for the
Chicago Globe newspaper and then for St. Louis Globe-Democrat . After proposing in 1893 he married Sara White on December 28,1889 . They ultimately separated in 1909, but were never formally divorced.
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. Dreiser took a job editing women''s magazines until he was forced to resign in 1910, because of an interoffice romance.
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 Others Stories, in 1918.. The collection contained 9 stories
.His first commercial success was An American Tragedy,in 1928, 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 AvisLinnel 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.”
Other works include
The Genius and Trilogy of Desire (a three-parter comprised of The Financier912,The Titan,(1914) and The Stoic.. The latter was published posthumously in 1947.
In 1919 Sherwood Anderson wrote about Dreiser: "... he is very, very old. I do not know how many years he has lived, perhaps forty, perhaps fifty, but he is very old. Something grey and bleak and hurtful, that has been in the world perhaps forever, is personified in him." After his wife''s death in 1942, Dreiser married his cousin Helen Richardson, who had been his companion from 1919. Dreiser died in Hollywood, California, on December 28, 1945. In the last months of his life, Dreiser joined the Communist Party. In the 1920''s Dreiser had travelled in Russia and depicted his experiences in" Dreiser looks to Russia"(1928). During the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, Dreiser was considered a security risk and the F.B.I. had a dossier on him. Like many intellectuals in the 1930s (Hemingway, John Dos Passos, André Malraux, C. Day Lewis etc.), Dreiser had travelled to Spain during the civil war in support of the socialist government. Only a small number of writers supported Franco - George Santayana and Ezra Pound were the most famous. "He had an enormous influence on American literature during the first quarter of the century - and for a time he was American literature, the only writer worth talking about in the same breath with the European masters. Out of his passions, contradictions, and sufferings, he wrenched the art that was his salvation from the hungers and depressions that racked him. It was no wonder that he elevated the creative principle to a godhead and encouraged by word and example truthful expression in others."
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