Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 17, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and non-fiction writer who explored the facets of naturalismlike no one in American literature had done before. He is known for his intense and real-life portrayals of life, often placing his characters in harsh circumstances that were distasteful and amoral to readers. Because of Dreiser's drive to create naturalistic works, he often fought against censorship in various forms. The censorship lasted well past his death, as Dreiser did not live to see many of his novels published in their original form, for example,Sister Carrie (1900) was not published in its entirety until 1981. Despite the lack of popularity that faced his career, most erudites recognized the great originality and quality in Theodore Dreiser's works.
Early Life
Theodore Dreiser was the ninth child born to John Paul Dreiser and Säräh Schanab in 1871. The family, which consisted of ten living children, (the eldest of whom was Paul Dresser, the popular songwriter)settled in Terre Haute, Indiana. The town was the site of settlement for many German immigrants. John had previously worked in various woolen mills in the east, and so when he moved to the Midwest, he finally earned enough to establish his own mill. John was a hard-working man who had emigrated from Germany. As he made his way west, he lived in Dayton, Ohio for a time, and there he met seventeen year old Säräh Schanab, a young girl from a Mennonite community. The couple seemed an unlikely match in matters of age (John was twelve years her senior) and religion, but they fell in love just the same. They were met with severe opposition from Sarah's family who threatened to disown her if she went through with the marriage. Sarah did not heed their threats, and she eloped with John and converted to Catholicism. She never had contact with her family again.
The couple were devout Catholics, and raised their children to follow the Catholic faith. Despite their best efforts to support the family, John's woolen mill met with failure when it caught fire and burned down. This failure placed upon the family a blanket of poverty that they would never be able to shake off. The family became nomadic, following John around from town to town as he looked for work. The constant moving around made Theodore's chance at 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 consisted of months in severe Catholic parochial schools. The strictness of the schools in teaching Dreiser the Catholic religion bread in him a severe abhorrence to the religion itself, and is the root of his harsh criticisms of Catholicism. Thus, Dreiser's real education came from the books he poured himself into. He read constantly, getting his hands on copies of authors such as Freud, Hawthorne, Poe, Shakespeare, Spencer, and Balzac. With the words of these men circling in his mind, Dreiser began to form his own ideas about the world, and in particular, religion.
Finally, at the age of 16, Theodore Dreiser had enough of following his parents in poverty. He left home and worked at whatever jobs he could find, the similarities between he and his father seemed imminent. However, things changed when he came in contact with an old teacher while working in Chicago. With the financial help of a former teacher, Mildred Fielding, Dreiser made strives in his education as he was able to be admitted to Indiana University in 1889, however, it was a short-lived education when he flunked out a year later. Throughout these formative years, it was his voracious appetite for reading that had the most impact on his future career as a writer.
Career
After Dreiser's brief stint in college, he decided to pursue a career path as a writer. Theodore began with an initial job at the Chicago Globe newspaper in 1892, but he left the globe for a more lucrative position at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Here Dreiser gained the reputation of being "a writing machine", as one of his editors referred to him. He excelled at writing local cultural pieces where he was able to describe vividly the local dialogue, present character sketches of people, and clearly depict the flavor of the individual towns. 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. During any free time he had, he yearned to improve his scanty education, thus he continued to read, and not just literature. He began consuming books on politics, philosophy, psychology, and history. As a public writer for the newspaper, Dreiser also became adept at writing for his own pleasure and satisfaction, and this drive led him to begin with several real and gritty short stories. One of these stories included his account of a lynching he had witnessed. He called the story Nigger Jeff and found a publisher 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 1897 Dreiser became a freelance writer, working for several newspapers and magazines at a time, among them were Munsey's Metropolitan and Harper's Monthly. For several of the articles he wrote, he was able to interview various influential people of his time, including Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison. During this exciting time in his life, he finally felt financially stable enough to marry, and in 1898, he married Sara White. Early on in their marriage, Sara was most encouraging and supportive. It was she who finally gave him the courage to begin writing his first novel, Sister Carrie (1900). The novel is based, in part, on the scandalous behavior of his sister, Emma. It tells the story of a young country girl who moves to the urban city of Chicago, and there falls into a terrible life of sin and denigration.
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.
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, (from the 1981 version).
Even though the book did poorly in its first printing, many critics saw in Dreiser a man who knew how to portray the harsh and realistic side of life. At only 29, Dreiser was beginning to make a name for himself. The book's failure was due impart 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
- Cassuto, Leonard and Clare Virginia Eby, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. ISBN 0521894654
- Loving, Jerome. The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley: U of California P, 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
- [http://www.geocities.com/mustavapint/eclectica.htm For an English viewpoint of Dreiser and comparisons between the book and the film.
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