DREISER, THEODORE 1871-1945

Realist writer

Up from Poverty

Theodore Dreiser's personal experience of poverty, hunger, struggle, and social injustice informed his brand of social realism. Dreiser's America was one beset by class conflict and the ravages of capitalism. His novels were peopled by characters shaped by the difficulties of urban life, not by ideals of the middle class. Critics often dismissed him as being crude and journalistic in his writing; his advocates saw such criticism as a form of class hostility. Whichever side a reader took, few were left indifferent to Dreiser's exploration of crime, capitalism, and sexual passion. Both professionally and personally, Dreiser was an infamous character and an enormously influential figure in American letters for three decades.

Early Life

Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871 into a large, poor Catholic family. His parents, both immigrants, lost their business the year Dreiser was born, and his early years were filled with the daily insecurities of poverty. The family moved frequently, from Terre Haute, to Evansville, to Chicago, and back to rural Indiana. Dreiser's family provided him with the basic materials for many of his fictional families: a warm, forgiving mother, a narrow-minded, disciplinarian father, and fun-loving, wayward children. It also provided a major plot of his fiction: pushing on to new worlds as the old one crashes. Tired of his life at home, the sixteen-year-old Dreiser moved to Chicago and then to Bloomington, where he attended Indiana University for one year in 1889.

Newspaper Reporter

The following year Dreiser returned to Chicago and worked at menial jobs until in 1892, at the age of twenty-one, he landed a job at a local newspaper. He did a stint of reporting in Saint Louis the following year. The daily round of a newspaper reporter brought Dreiser into contact with the underside of urban America, a world of robberies, murders, illegalities, crime, and catastrophe. In 1894 Dreiser moved to Pittsburgh and then to New York City, where he landed a job writing a daily column, which left him free much of the day. Dreiser continued his education by reading at the public library. In 1895 he began editing a magazine, Ev'ry Month, to which he contributed editorials, cultural reviews, and book reviews. Two years later, Dreiser left newspaper journalism for the expanding and competitive world of freelance writing. In 1897 he married Sallie White after a lengthy engagement Dreiser bitterly resented.

Sister Carrie.

In 1899 Dreiser began his first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), his story of individual failure and success in a great American city. Dreiser submitted his manuscript to a new publishing firm, Doubleday, Page. There Frank Norris, a naturalist author, strongly endorsed Sister Carrie, and the firm decided to publish it. When Frank N. Doubleday, the firm's principal partner, returned from Europe, he demanded revisions, deeming the novel scandalous and unfit for the reading public. The adventures of Carrie, the heroine of the novel, flew in the face of Victorian morality. Dreiser refused to change his manuscript and refused to break the agreement the firm had made with him. Reluctantly, Doubleday, Page finally agreed to publish Sister Carrie but did nothing by way of promoting or advertising the novel, which did not sell. Dreiser's supporters cast him as a martyr to American puritanism, or what they called its narrow-minded hypocrisy toward the gritty reality of American city life.

Editor

Dreiser immediately started work on a second novel, but his progress was slowed by money problems, now that he no longer wrote for magazines, and by the deterioration of his marriage. Dreiser became depressed and roamed the country in search of a cheap room in which to write. By 1903 he was penniless and in New York City, wary of meeting old friends. His brother Paul came to his rescue. Paul, a songwriter who called himself Paul Dresser and is most often remembered for having written "On the Banks of the Wabash," sent Dreiser to a "health camp," where he regained his emotional and physical health. In 1905 Dreiser returned to magazine writing as the editor of the popular monthly, Smith's magazine. His success at Smith's, and from 1906 to 1907 at the Broadway Magazine, was capped in late 1907 when he became editor of a popular women's magazine of the day, Butterick's Delineator.

Returning to Fiction

The republication of Sister Carrie in 1907 to critical acclaim fueled Dreiser's desire to return to fiction writing. Encouraged by his friendship with critic H. L. Mencken, Dreiser found himself restless from the daily routine of publishing a magazine, yet reluctant to give up the financial success such work en-tailed. After he started an affair with the daughter of a contributing writer, the Delineator fired Dreiser. The affair and its aftermath galvanized him to write, and he published Jennie Gerhardt in 1911. The novel was a critical and popular success.

Unleashing

At the age of forty Dreiser entered a remarkably productive phase of his career. He wrote four long novels, The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), The "Genius" (1915), and An American Tragedy (1925), four equally lengthy works of travel narrative and autobiography, two volumes of plays, four collections of short stories, and a volume of philosophical essays. In 1914, with both his marriage and the affair over, Dreiser moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There he had several romantic relationships, the most important with Helen Patges Richardson, whom he married in 1944, a year before his death.

Offending the Critics

Dreiser's novels continued to generate controversy, particularly his depiction of the sex drive in human experience. Many found The Financier and The Titan offensive for their representations of sexuality. With The "Genius" in 1915, critics felt Dreiser had offended them long enough. In 1915 the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, led by Anthony Corn-stock, brought an action to have the novel banned. Dreiser's friend Mencken organized a campaign to force the courts to void any censorship of the novel. This incident confirmed in many people's minds the image of Dreiser as both a champion of artistic freedom and the victim of prudery.

An American Tragedy.

For three years, from 1919 to 1922, Dreiser lived in Los Angeles. There he followed the coverage of the sensational murder trial of Chester Gillette, who murdered his fiancée to be free to pursue a wealthier woman. The trial provided Dreiser with the skeleton plot of An American Tragedy, considered his masterpiece. Movie and play adaptations brought him needed financial security. In the wake of such success, Dreiser's attention turned to nonfiction writing again. His nonfiction centered on a different kind of American tragedy, this one explicitly social and economic. Like many American writers in the first half of the twentieth century, Dreiser wanted to make the United States a better place to live. At the same time, his realist impulses demanded he acknowledge and expose America's underlying social problems. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Dreiser's politics became more radical. In November 1927 he visited the Soviet Union, and like many other intellectuals of his day, he was fascinated by the "Russian experiment." Dreiser supported many left-wing causes in such works as Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928) and Tragic America (1931).

Later Life

The Great Depression wiped out much of Dreiser's personal wealth and that of his publisher, Horace Liveright. Dreiser lost his country home and his New York City apartment. In 1932 he moved to Los Angeles again. There he became even more convinced that the Soviet Union was being sabotaged by capitalist countries. His last nonfiction book, America Is Worth Saving (1941), centered solely on Dreiser's political views in support of communism. While in California, Dreiser set out to complete two previously drafted novels, The Bulwark (1945) and The Stoic (1947), which were posthumously published. Dreiser died in Los Angeles in late December 1945.

Source:

Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey (London: John Wiley, 1993).

Theodore Dreiser , 1871–1945, American novelist, b. Terre Haute, Ind. A pioneer of naturalism in American literature, Dreiser wrote novels reflecting his mechanistic view of life, a concept that held humanity as the victim of such ungovernable forces as economics, biology, society, and even chance. In his works, conventional morality is unimportant, consciously virtuous behavior having little to do with material success and happiness. While his style and language tended to be clumsy and plodding, he played an important role in introducing a new realism and sexual candor into American fiction. Dreiser was born into a large and poor family. His education was irregular, but, with help from a sympathetic high school teacher, he spent the year 1889–90 at the Univ. of Indiana. After working as a journalist on several midwestern newspapers, in 1894 he went to New York City, where he began a career in publishing, eventually rising to the presidency of Butterick Publications.

His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), the story of a country girl's rise to material success first as the mistress of a wealthy man and then as an actress, horrified its publisher, who gave it only limited circulation. Dreiser distributed it himself, but it was consistently attacked as immoral; it was reissued in 1982 with many passages from his revised typescript restored. Jennie Gerhardt (1911), again about a "fallen woman," met with a better response; its success allowed Dreiser to work as a writer full time. With these two works, Dreiser started his long battle for the right of the novelist to portray life as he sees it.

In The Financier (1912), he turned his attention more specifically to American social and economic institutions. This novel, the first of a trilogy that includes The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947), describes the rise to power of a ruthless industrialist. In both The Genius (1915) and in The Bulwark (1946), Dreiser explores the failings of an American artist. An American Tragedy (1925), often considered his greatest work, tells of a poor young man's futile effort to achieve social and financial success; the attempt ends in his execution for murder. In his later life Dreiser became interested in socialism, visiting the Soviet Union as a guest of the government and writing his perceptions: Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928) and Tragic America (1931). Among his other works are such collections of short stories as Free (1918), Chains (1927), and A Gallery of Women (1929).

Bibliography: See his memoirs, A Traveler at Forty (1913), A Book About Myself (1922; republished as Newspaper Days, 1931), and Dawn (1931); his letters, ed. by R. Elias (3 vol., 1959); biographies by W. A. Swanberg (1965) and R. Lingeman (2 vol., 1986–90); studies by E. Moers (1969), F. O. Matthiessen (1951, repr. 1973), J. Lundquist (1974), and L. E. Hussman (1983).

Dreiser, Theodore (1871–1945), novelist.Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, the son of German‐American parents, Theodore Dreiser endured poverty and ostracism as a boy. The popular songwriter Paul Dresser (1857–1911) was his brother. Dreiser worked as a reporter in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York, absorbing impressions of urban crime and vice, wealth and poverty. His journalistic experience, Balzac's novels, and Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism turned him toward determinism and fictional realism. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), a tale of a young woman's career in the city, was attacked as immoral or found shocking and grim by most critics. Jennie Gerhardt (1911), the story of an impoverished young woman driven by family poverty to become a rich man's mistress, was championed by young writers rebelling against the Victorian idealism dominating American fiction and criticism. In The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914) Dreiser chronicled the rise of the fictional robber baron Frank Cowperwood, modeled on the Chicago financier and traction magnate Charles Yerkes (1837–1905). Dreiser's autobiographical novel The “Genius” (1915) was banned for nearly a decade. His masterpiece, An American Tragedy (1925), is a powerfully documented narrative about a young man impelled by ambition and dreams of wealth to plot the murder of his pregnant sweetheart. In the 1930s Dreiser was sporadically active in radical politics. The Bulwark (1946) tells of a Quaker whose faith is tested, and The Stoic (1947) concluded the Cowperwood trilogy.
See also Literature: Civil War to World War I; Literature: Since World War I.

Bibliography

Ellen Moers , Two Dreisers, 1969.
Richard Lingeman , Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City (1871–1910), 1986.
Richard Lingeman , Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey (1910–1945), 1990.

Richard Lingeman

Dreiser, Theodore Herman Albert (1871–1945), American novelist. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), is a powerful account of a working girl's rise to worldly success, and of the slow decline of her lover and protector Hurstwood. It was withheld from circulation by its publishers, who were apprehensive about Dreiser's frank and amoral treatment of Carrie's sexuality and ambition. Other novels include Jennie Gerhardt (1911) and a trilogy about an unscrupulous business magnate, Frank Cowperwood (The Financier, 1912; The Titan, 1914; The Stoic, 1947). An American Tragedy (1925) is the story of Clyde Griffiths, who escapes from his evangelist parents to the exciting and colourful life of a bell-boy in a Kansas City hotel; he moves to New York State to work in a collar factory, and when his girl-friend Roberta becomes pregnant he drowns her, possibly accidentally, and is tried and condemned to death. Dreiser's many other works include Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928) and America Is Worth Saving (1941), which express the growing faith in socialism that replaced the nihilistic naturalism and pessimism of his earlier works.

Dreiser, Theodore Herman Albert (1871–1945) US writer. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), was considered immoral by its publisher and Dreiser distributed it himself. Jennie Gerhardt (1911) was also attacked for its uncompromising naturalism. The Cowperwood trilogy includes The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947). Dresier's greatest work, An American Tragedy (1925), is based on the Chester Gillette-Grace Brown murder case of 1906.