Theodore Dreiser Biography and List of Works

American author, outstanding representantive of naturalism, whose novels depict real-life subjects in a harsh light. Dreiser's novels were held to be amoral, and he battled throughout his career against censorship, starting from his first novel, SISTER CARRIE (1900). Dreiser's principal concern was with the conflict between human needs and the demands of society for material success.

"A woman should some day write the complete philosophy of clothes. No matter how young, it is one of the things she wholly comprehends. There is an indescribably faint line in the matter of man's apparel which somehow divides for her those who are worth glancing at and those who are not. Once an individual has passed this faint line on the way downward he will get no glance from her. There is another line at which the dress of a man will cause her to study her own."
(from Sister Carrie)

Dreiser was born in Sullivan, Indiana, as the ninth of the ten children. His parents were poor. In the 1860s his father, a devout Catholic German immigrant, had attempted to establish his own woolen mill, but after it was destroyed in a fire, the family lived in poverty. Dreiser's schooling was erratinc, when the family moved from town to town. He left home when he was 16 and worked at whatever jobs he could find. With the help of his former teacher, he was able to spend the year 1889-1890 at the University of Indiana. Dreiser left after only a year. He was, however, a voracious reader, and the impact of such writers as Hawthorne, Poe, Balzac, Herbert Spenser, and Freud influenced his thought and his reaction against organized religion.

In 1892 Dreiser started to write for the Chicago Globe, and moved to better position with the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. In 1898 he married Sara White, a Missouri schoolteacher, but the marriage was unhappy. Dreiser separated permanently from her in 1909, but never earnestly sought a divorce. In his own life Dreiser practiced his principle, that man's greatest appetite is sexual, and often carried on several affairs at once.

As a novelist Dreiser made his debut with Sister Carrie, a powerful account of a young working girl's rise to succes and her slow decline. The president of the publishing company, Frank Doubleday, disapproved the work - Dreiser allowed vice to be rewarded instead of punished. No attempt was made to promote the book. Sister Carrie was reissued in 1907 and it became one of the most celebrated novels in literary history.

The 500 sold copies of his first novel and family troubles drove Dreiser to the verge of suicide. He worked at a variety of literary jobs, and as a editor in chief of three women's magazines until 1910, when he was forced to resign, because of an office love affair. In 1911 appeared Dreiser's second novel, JENNIE GERHARDT, a story about a woman who sacficifes her own interests to avoid harming her lover's career. It was followed by novels based on the life of the American transportation magnate Charles T. Jerkes, THE FINANCIER (1912), and THE TITAN (1914), which show the influence of the evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spenser and Nietzsche's concept of the übemensch. Last volume of the trilogy, THE STOIC, was finished in 1945, and in the same year Dreiser joined the Communist Party.

Dreiser's semiautobiographical novel THE 'GENIUS' (1915) was censured by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The book remained off he market until Liveright reissued it five years later. Dreiser's commercially most successful novel was AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1925), which was adapted into screen first time in 1931, and second time under the title A Place in the Sun in 1951. The book made Dreiser the champion of social reformers, but his later works did not attain similar notice. The novel depicts the rise and fall of an ambitious young man who is determined to acquire wealth and status even if he must commit murder to do so.

Much of Dreiser's works evolved from his own experiences of poverty. Among his rare excursions into the realm of fantasy is the ghost story 'The Hand' (1920). It is a tale of murder and the haunting of the killer, but again behind the nightmare of the protagonist are the familiar themes of Dreiser's novels - fear of losing one' social position, feelings of moral guilt arising during the unrestrained struggle for success.

"People did live, then, after they were dead, especially evil people - people stronger than you, perhaps. They had the power to come back, to haunt, to annoy you if they didn't like anything you had done to them."
(from 'The Hand')

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.

"At the height of his success, when he had settled old scores and could easily have become the smiling public man, he chose instead to rip the whole fabric of American civilization straight down the middle, from its economy to its morality. It was the country that had to give ground."
(Nelson Algren, in Nation, 16 May, 1959)

An American Tragedy - The novel tells a story of a bellboy, Clyde Griffiths, indecisive like Hamlet, who sets out to gain wordly success and fame. After an automobile accident ,Clyde is employed by a distant relative, owner of a collar factory. He seduces Roberta Alden, an employee at the factory, but falls in love with Sondra Finchley, a girl of the local aristocracy. Roberta, now pregnant, demands Clyde to marry her. He takes Roberta rowing on an isolated lake and in this dreamlike sequence 'accidentally' murders her. Clyde's trial, conviction, and execution occupy the remainder of the book. Dreiser points out, that materialistic society is as much to blame as the murderer himself. Dreiser based his study on the actual case of Chester Gillette, who murdered Grace Brown at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack in July 1906. An American Tragedy was banned in Boston in 1927.

For further reading: Theodore Dreiser by B. Rascoe (1926); Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free by D. Dudley (1933); Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature by R.H. Elias (1949); Theodore Dreiser by F.O. Matthiessen (1951); The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, ed. by C. Shapiro and A. Kazin (1955); Theodore Dreiser by P.L. Gerber (1964); Dreiser by W.A. Swanberg (1965); Theodore Dreiser by M. Thader (1965); Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels by R. Lehan (1969); Homage to Theodore Dreiser by R.P. Warren (1971); Theodore Dreiser by J. Lundquist (1974); Theodore Dreiser: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography by D. Pizer (1975); The Novels of Theodore Dreiser by D. Pizer (1977); The Gospel of Wealth in the American Novel by Arun Mukherjee (1987); After Eden by Conrad Eugene Ostwalt (1990); Dearest Wilding, ed. by Thomas P. Riggio (1995); Love That Will Not Let Me Go, ed. by Marguerite Tjader (1998); An American Tragedy by Paul A. Orlov (1998); Dreiser and Veblen Saboteurs of the Status Quo by Clare Virginia Eby (1999); Reading the Sympton by Mohamed Zanyani (1999) - See also: H.L. Mencken

SISTER CARRIE, (1900)