Encyclopedia, Difference between revisions of "Theodore Dreiser" - New World
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| − | After | + | After his brief stint in college he made his first step to a literary career with a job at the ''Chicago Globe'' newspaper in 1892. He soon left the globe for a more lucrative position at the ''St. Louis Globe-Democrat'' where he gained a reputation for being "a writing machine", as one of his editors referred to him. He excelled at writing local feature pieces where he vividly captured the flavor of communities and their local characters. As his reputation grew, Dreiser was asked to contribute fiction as well and he often wrote poetry and even a script for a comedic opera. He continued to educate himself by reading widely in fiction, science, natural history, and philosophy. |
| + | While working for O. S. Marden's ''Success'' he interviewed celebrities like [[Andrew Carnegie]], [[Thomas Edison]], [[Marshall Field]], [[William Dean Howells]], and [[Philip Armour]]. For other magazines he wrote articles on a viariety of subjects that included America's fruit growing industry, the meatpacking business in Chicago, modern art and the photography of [[Alfred Stieglitz]]. | ||
| − | + | During this time Dreiser experiments with poetry and fiction led him to write a short story about a lynching he had witnessed. ''Nigger Jeff'' was published in a small monthly journal called ''Ainslee''. | |
| − | + | In 1893, Dreiser was sent by the ''Globe'' to cover the Columbia Exposition, and while there he became acquainted with a local school teacher, Sara White. In 1898, they were married and Sara encouraged him to write his first novel, ''Sister Carrie'' (1900). The novel is based partly on the scandalous behavior of his sister, Emma, who had an affair with a married man who embezzled funds from his employer. It tells the story of a young country girl who moves to the urban city of Chicago, and falls into an life of degradation. | |
| + | {{Quotation|She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterized her thoughts it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in the throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.|Sister Carrie|(from the 1981 version).}} | ||
| − | Even though the book did poorly in its first printing, | + | Even though the book did poorly in its first printing, at only 29 Dreiser was beginning to make a name for himself. The book's failure was due in part to the lack of publicity by Dreiser's publishing company. To counter the slight by his publisher, it was necessary for Dreiser to take a regular, paying job. He became an editor for a collection of women's magazines, but in 1910, he was forced to resign due to the discovery of an intraoffice romance. Things in Dreiser's personal life had not been well, the failure of his marriage, combined with the failure of his novel caused Dreiser to attempt suicide. Although he never divorced Sara officially, the couple decided to permanently separated in 1909. |
While his personal life was tumultuous during the early years of his career, he still kept to his writing, and by 1911, Dreiser's second novel, ''Jennie Gerhardt'', was published. Again, the novel told of a young woman, Jennie, who was seduced by the town Senator. Jennie becomes pregnant, has a child, and lives a life of poverty; she never tells anyone who the father is so that the Senator's career is protected. The success of ''Jennie'' marked the beginning of a very steady writing career as novel after novel was published. ''The Financier'' was published in 1912, ''The Titan'' in 1914, and ''The Stoic'' in 1945. May consider these three books to form a trilogy that dealt with evolutionary ideas of Spencer and Nietzsche, while portraying these ideas through largely successful business men. Dreiser did not feel comfortable writing "safe novels", he continued to stretch himself and his literary ground. | While his personal life was tumultuous during the early years of his career, he still kept to his writing, and by 1911, Dreiser's second novel, ''Jennie Gerhardt'', was published. Again, the novel told of a young woman, Jennie, who was seduced by the town Senator. Jennie becomes pregnant, has a child, and lives a life of poverty; she never tells anyone who the father is so that the Senator's career is protected. The success of ''Jennie'' marked the beginning of a very steady writing career as novel after novel was published. ''The Financier'' was published in 1912, ''The Titan'' in 1914, and ''The Stoic'' in 1945. May consider these three books to form a trilogy that dealt with evolutionary ideas of Spencer and Nietzsche, while portraying these ideas through largely successful business men. Dreiser did not feel comfortable writing "safe novels", he continued to stretch himself and his literary ground. | ||
Revision as of 22:11, 24 December 2006
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 17, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American journalist and novelist who was one of the leading literary figures to employ naturalismin his writings. His intense and real-life portrayals of characters whose lives were considered amoral pitted him against the forces of censorship. His characters were often guilty of sexual improprieties like infidelity and prostitution, but the American public felt his portrayals were far too sympathic. Public discussion of sexual matters were taboo in his day and especially those of an immoral nature.
The censorship lasted well past his death, as Dreiser did not live to see many of his novels published in their original form. Sister Carrie (1900) was not published in its entirety until 1981. It was the story of a young girl who has two illicit sexual relationships. His "An American Tragedy", published in 1925, would later come to be considered a landmark work in American fiction, even though it was banned in Boston in 1927. The novel dealt with the apparent opposites of religious fundamentalism and the extreme individualism and money-worship that is presented as the 'American Dream'. His employed a variety of religious viewpoints in his works that dealt with the conflict between religious and materialistic point of view, including Evangelical Protestantism, Quakerism, Hinduism and Buddhism.
While his writings often focused on the commonplace and sordid in human existence they also challenged contemporary perspectives on the ideal American family. His works explore the conflict between a foreign-born father who fails to understand American ways and the second generation's rebellion against Old World religious and moral values. These motifs were prominent in An American Tragedy, Jennie Gerhardt (1911) and in The Bulwark (1946).
Early Life
Theodore Dreiser was the ninth child born to John Paul Dreiser and Säräh Schanab in 1871. His father had emigrated from Mayen, Germany in 1844, worked briefly in New England wool mills, and then moved to the Midwest, where large numbers of Germans had settled. He went first to Dayton, Ohio, where he met Sarah, the 17 year old daughter of a Mennonite family. Since he was a Roman Catholic and 12 years her senior her family, her family, strongly anti-papist, threatened to disown her. They eloped and she converted to Catholicism. She never had contact with her family again.
The couple raised their children to follow the Catholic faith. John was successful enough to own his own woolen mill but their fortunes changed dramatically in 1869 when it burned down and he suffered a serious injury. The family became nomadic as Dreiser's father looked for work during the national economic depression of the early 1870s. The constant moving made Theodore's education erratic at best. He would begin a school and three months later be pulled out, only to repeat the process in the next town he moved to. The brief education he did have came in Catholic parochial schools. The strictness he encountered there bred in him a severe abhorrence to the religion. As a result Dreiser's real education came from self study of books. He avidly read the works of Freud, Hawthorne, Poe, Shakespeare, Spencer, and Balzac.
At the age of 16, Dreiser left home and worked at at odd jobs until he came across a former teacher, Mildred Fielding, in Chicago. She paid for him to attend one year at Indiana University in Bloomington (1889-90).
Career
After his brief stint in college he made his first step to a literary career with a job at the Chicago Globe newspaper in 1892. He soon left the globe for a more lucrative position at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat where he gained a reputation for being "a writing machine", as one of his editors referred to him. He excelled at writing local feature pieces where he vividly captured the flavor of communities and their local characters. As his reputation grew, Dreiser was asked to contribute fiction as well and he often wrote poetry and even a script for a comedic opera. He continued to educate himself by reading widely in fiction, science, natural history, and philosophy.
While working for O. S. Marden's Success he interviewed celebrities like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Marshall Field, William Dean Howells, and Philip Armour. For other magazines he wrote articles on a viariety of subjects that included America's fruit growing industry, the meatpacking business in Chicago, modern art and the photography of Alfred Stieglitz.
During this time Dreiser experiments with poetry and fiction led him to write a short story about a lynching he had witnessed. Nigger Jeff was published in a small monthly journal called Ainslee.
In 1893, Dreiser was sent by the Globe to cover the Columbia Exposition, and while there he became acquainted with a local school teacher, Sara White. In 1898, they were married and Sara encouraged him to write his first novel, Sister Carrie (1900). The novel is based partly on the scandalous behavior of his sister, Emma, who had an affair with a married man who embezzled funds from his employer. It tells the story of a young country girl who moves to the urban city of Chicago, and falls into an life of degradation.
She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterized her thoughts it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in the throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.
Sister Carrie, (from the 1981 version).
Even though the book did poorly in its first printing, at only 29 Dreiser was beginning to make a name for himself. The book's failure was due in part to the lack of publicity by Dreiser's publishing company. To counter the slight by his publisher, it was necessary for Dreiser to take a regular, paying job. He became an editor for a collection of women's magazines, but in 1910, he was forced to resign due to the discovery of an intraoffice romance. Things in Dreiser's personal life had not been well, the failure of his marriage, combined with the failure of his novel caused Dreiser to attempt suicide. Although he never divorced Sara officially, the couple decided to permanently separated in 1909.
While his personal life was tumultuous during the early years of his career, he still kept to his writing, and by 1911, Dreiser's second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was published. Again, the novel told of a young woman, Jennie, who was seduced by the town Senator. Jennie becomes pregnant, has a child, and lives a life of poverty; she never tells anyone who the father is so that the Senator's career is protected. The success of Jennie marked the beginning of a very steady writing career as novel after novel was published. The Financier was published in 1912, The Titan in 1914, and The Stoic in 1945. May consider these three books to form a trilogy that dealt with evolutionary ideas of Spencer and Nietzsche, while portraying these ideas through largely successful business men. Dreiser did not feel comfortable writing "safe novels", he continued to stretch himself and his literary ground.
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, Nation, 16 May, 1959
The underlying theme of all of Dreiser's works was poverty, naturalism, harsh realities, and the injustice and consequence of inequality. Dreiser himself admitted freely that he would never have been able to pen such writings if he had not personally experienced the poverty and harshness that life had to offer first hand.
Success and Censorship
Theodore Dreiser met with success and censorship throughout his writing career. His first round of censorship came with his very first publication as a novelist. The story behind Sister Carrie is one of the most famous stories in all of publishing history. The novel was published (edited for content in several parts) by the Doubleday company. However, the verbal agreement and contract given to Dreiser came not from Doubleday (who was on a business trip in Europe at the time), but from a beginning editor, Frank Norris. Norris read the copy of Sister Carrie and believed it to be the best work he had read since starting at Doubleday. He was so convincing in his convictions that he persuaded the second in command, Walter Hines Page, to offer Dreiser a contract. The rough draft was underway to becoming a published book when Doubleday returned, read the book, and was disgusted. He thought the book represented everything immoral and wrong in society. He refused to publish a novel that herald a fallen woman as a heroine. Doubleday tried to get out of the agreement, but at cost to the companies reputation, Mr. Doubleday's lawyer firmly convinced him to publish Dreiser's novel. Even though the publishing house published the book, they did nothing for the publicity and the novel did not do well for this reason. This experience gave Dreiser his first glimpse of how many people would see his work. He often referred to this story when discussing the harms of censorship, and the novel grew in popularity among those who also hated any means of censoring work.
Despite the different means and lengths that some went through to censor Dreiser's works, he still became a huge success. His first taste at the joys of commercial success came from his most widely read novel, An American Tragedy (1925), which has been made into a motion picture on two occasions, once in 1931 and again in 1951 (under the title A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor). This novel is also considered one of the top one hundred novels of all time. An American Tragedy was banned in Boston in 1927, as it was based on a murder case from that state. The main character, Clyde Griffiths, a poor bell-boy who seduces a young woman, Robert, but he leaves her when he falls in love with an aristocrat. Roberta becomes pregnant, and Clyde, worried that she will ruin all of his plans for weath and popularity, murders her. The end of the novel deals with Clyde's hearing and conviction.
In 1935 the library trustees of Warsaw, Indiana ordered the burning of all the library's works by Dreiser. This was probably the largest act of censorship that Dreiser ever encountered.
Writing Style
Dreiser had a unique style characterized by his excessively long sentences that depict his scrutinizing attention to detail. These characteristics caused his work to be even more real that his contemporaries. It was he alone who was able to reach such heights of realism in his work, it was he alone who explored the social status of society with so much detail, emphasizing the causes and effects of such behaviors and beliefs.
Needless to say, long sentences and attention to detail do not make Dreiser's books the most easy and cozy to read. They take dedication and diligence, but are well worth the task for the ideas and depictions the reader comes away with. In fact, many would not complement Dreiser's style at all, deciding only to comment on his rich realism and his contributions to naturalism in the written word. His stunning character development and his portrayal of rural and urban American life had an enormous influence on generations to follow. In his tribute "Dreiser" from Horses and Men (1923), Sherwood Anderson writes:
- 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... The 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.
Humorist Corey Ford (writing as "John Riddell") quipped that Dreiser had only one plot: Boy meets Girl = Tragedy.
Renowned mid-century literary critic Irving Howe said of Dreiser, He was "among the American giants, one of the very few American giants we have had."
Later Life
In 1942, Dreiser's wife, Sara died, and Dreiser married his cousin, Helen Richardson. The two had been living as a couple since 1919. In the 1920s, Dreiser joined the American Communist Party and was considered by many in America to be a danger. For this reason, the F.B.I. constantly followed him and kept his actions under surveillance. The later part of his life, Dreiser returned to writing non-fiction, and he wrote several books on political issues including Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), which was a direct result of his travels in Russia. He also wroteTragic America (1931) and America is Worth Saving (1941). Dreiser was also an advocate for socialism and became very fascinated and actively involved in several political campaigns against various social injustices. Among these were the lynching of Frank Little, who was one of the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the deportation of Emma Goldman, and the conviction of the trade union leader Tom Mooney.
Dreiser died of heart failure at his home in Hollywood, California on December 28th 1945.
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.
Richard Linegman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey 1908-1945
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Lingeman, Richard, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, Wiley (1993) ISBN 0471574260
- Cassuto, Leonard and Clare Virginia Eby, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, Cambridge (2004) ISBN 0521894654
- Loving, Jerome. The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser, University of California Press (2005). ISBN 0520234812
Further Reading
- Dreiser, Helen. My Life With Dreiser. Cleveland: World, 1951.
- Dudley, Dorothy. Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1932. ISBN 0403009170
- Elias, Robert H. Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature. New York: Knopf, 1949; revised, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970.
- Lingeman, Richard. Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907. New York: Putnam, 1986.
- Matthiessen, F. O. Theodore Dreiser. New York: Sloane, 1951.
- Riggio, Thomas P., ed. Dreiser-Mencken Letters: The Correspondence of Theodore Dreiser & H. L. Mencken, 1907-1945 . 2 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. ISBN 081228044X
- Swanberg, W. A. Dreiser. New York: Scribner's, 1965.
External links
- The International Theodore Dreiser Society
- DreiserWebSource University of Pennsylvania Library
- Theodore Dreiser Collection at University of Virginia
- Works by Theodore Dreiser. Project Gutenberg
- Some impressions of the Buddha: Dreiser and Sir Edwin Arnold's the light of Asia
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