Theodore Dreiser

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Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist 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 and agency.

Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).

Early life

Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to John Paul Dreiser and Sarah Maria (née Schanab). John Dreiser was a German immigrant from Mayen in the Rhine Province of Prussia, and Sarah was from the Mennonite farming community near Dayton, Ohio. Her family disowned her for converting to Roman 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, and his father could be harsh. His later fiction reflects these experiences.

After graduating from high school in Warsaw, Indiana, Dreiser attended Indiana University in 1889–1890 without taking a degree.

Personal life

Dreiser's appearance and personality were described by Edgar Lee Masters in a poem, Theodore Dreiser: A Portrait, published in The New York Review of Books.

While working as a newspaperman in St. Louis, Dreiser met schoolteacher Sara Osborne White. They became engaged in 1893 and married on December 28, 1898. They separated in 1909, partly due to Dreiser's infatuation with Thelma Cudlipp, the teenage daughter of a colleague, but were never formally divorced.

In 1913, he began a romantic relationship with the actress and painter Kyra Markham. In 1919, Dreiser met his cousin Helen Patges Richardson (1894-1955) with whom he began an affair. 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). Helen tolerated Dreiser's affairs, and they remained together until his death. Dreiser and Helen married on June 13, 1944, his first wife Sara having died in 1942.

Dreiser planned to return from his first European vacation on the Titanic, but was talked out of it by an English publisher who recommended he board a cheaper ship.

Dreiser was an atheist.

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Career

Dreiser began working as a reporter and drama critic for newspapers in Chicago, Saint Louis, Toledo, Pittsburgh, and New York in 1892. During this time, he published The Return of Genius, his first work of fiction, which appeared in the Chicago Daily Globe under the name Carl Dreiser. He was writing magazine articles by 1895. He wrote books about writers including Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Israel Zangwill, and John Burroughs, as well as interviews with journalists including Andrew Carnegie, Marshall Field, Thomas Edison, and Theodore Thomas. Lillian Nordica, Emilia E. Barr, Philip Armour, and Alfred Stieglitz were among his other interviewees.

Dreiser convinced business associates of his songwriter brother Paul to publish his first story, "Forgotten," a tale based on a song of his brother's entitled "The Letter That Never Came," in 1895. Dreiser's editing magazines remained, some of which were targeted at a predominantly female audience. He then began to work for financial independence, as Daniels explained.

Sara Dreiser and his first wife Sara stayed at the House of Four Pillars, an 1830s Greek Revival house in Maumee, Ohio. There Dreiser began working on his first book, Sister Carrie, which was published in 1900. Henry, who is unknown to Maude, sold a half-interest in the house to Dreiser in order to fund a move to New York without her.

Dreiser's sister, Carrie, portrayed a changing society by writing about a young woman who left rural life in Chiicago but is unable to find a job that pays a living wage, falls prey to several men, and eventually becomes a well-known actress. It failed well and was seen as controversial due to moral questions raised against it's inclusion of a country girl who pursues her aspirations of fame and fortune through intimate relationships with men. The book has a good reputation. It has been described as the "greatest of all American urban novels" in the book.

In 1901 Dreiser's short story "Nigger Jeff" was published in Ainslee's Magazine. It was based on a lynching that he witnessed in 1893.

In 1911, Jennie Gerhardt's second novel Jennie Gerhardt was published, with young women as protagonists reshaping urban life as young people moved from rural villages to cities.

An American Tragedy, published in 1925, was Dreiser's first commercial success. Dreiser began as a newspaperman in 1892, and he had been publishing newspapers from 1892.

Dreiser said he wrote such stories every year between 1895 and 1935. He based his book on the facts and the setting of Grace Brown's 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in upstate New York, which attracted a lot of attention from newspapers. Although the book did well, it was also chastised for its portrayal of a man without morals who commits a horrific murder.

Dreiser, who is best known as a novelist, also wrote short stories for his first collection Free and Other Stories in 1918, which culminated in 11 stories.

Paul Dresser, his older brother who became a well-known songwriter in the 1890s, was the subject of his book "My Brother Paul." This was the inspiration for the 1942 romantic film My Gal Salvation.

Dreiser also wrote poetry. His poem "The Aspirant" (1929) continues his theme of poverty and aspire: a young man in a shabbily-furnished room relates his own and the other tenants' aspirations, as well as questions about "why?"

why?"

The poem appeared in The Poetry Quartos, collected and printed by Paul Johnston, and published by Random House in 1929.

The Trilogy of Desire, which was based on Charles Tyson Yerkes' life and became a Chicago streetcar tycoon, is one of his many works. It is made up of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic. The last book was published posthumously in 1947.

Dreiser was often obliged to fight censorship because his portrayal of certain aspects of life, such as sexual harassment, offended authorities, and challenged commonly held assumptions of acceptable opinion. He was nominated by Swedish author Anders sterling for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, but Sinclair Lewis was turned down.

Dreiser was active in several campaigns for radicals who had been deemed victims of social injustice. These included Frank Little, one of the World's best-known designers of the Industrial Workers of the World, the deportation of Emma Goldman, and Thomas Mooney's conviction. Dreiser led the National Committee on Political Prisoners (NCDPP) in southeastern Kentucky in 1931 to hear from miners in Pineville and Harlan on the pattern of violence against the miners and their unions by the coal workers. The Harlan County War was a war in pattern.

Dreiser was a committed socialist and wrote several nonfiction books on political topics. These included Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), the result of his 1927 visit to the Soviet Union, and two books presenting a critical look at capitalist America (1941). During the Great Terror and the non-aggression agreement with Adolf Hitler, he praised the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Dreiser joined the Communist Party in the United States in August 1945 and later became the honorary president of the League of American Writers. Despite that some of his more radical colleagues, such as H. L. Mencken, talked about Dreiser's communism as a "unimportant part of his life," says 398 Dreiser's biographer Jerome Loving, that his political efforts have "essentially been in accordance with ostensible communist goals regarding the working class."

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