Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. Although some critics regarded his style as clumsy and plodding, Dreiser was generally recognized as an American literary pioneer.

Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. He was a reporter for the Chicago Daily Globe in 1892, dramatic editor and traveling correspondent for the St. Louis Globe Democrat from 1892 to 1893, and traveling correspondent for the St. Louis Republic from 1893 to 1894. His career as a novelist began in 1900 with Sister Carrie, which he wrote in the intervals between work for various magazines. The novel tells the story of a small-town girl who moves to Chicago and eventually becomes a Broadway star in New York City. It also traces the decline and eventual suicide of her lover. As a result of public outcry against the novel for its depiction of unrepentant and unpunished characters and for its frank treatment of sexual issues, the publisher withdrew the book from public sale. Dreiser continued writing, however, and he served as managing editor of Broadway Magazine from 1906 to 1907 and as editor in chief of Butterick publications from 1907 to 1910.

By the time Dreiser's second novel, Jenny Gerhardt, was published in 1911, his work had found influential supporters, including the British novelists H. G. Wells and Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, and he was able to devote himself entirely to literature. Dreiser's writings continued to excite controversy. In The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), he drew harsh portraits of a type of ruthless businessman. In The “Genius” (1915), he presented a study of the artistic temperament in a mercenary society. This novel increased his influence among young American writers, who acclaimed him leader of a new school of social realism (see Naturalism). Real fame, however, did not come to Dreiser until 1925, when his An American Tragedy had great popular success. The novel, based on an actual murder case and concerned with the efforts of a weak young man to rise from pious poverty into glamorous society, was dramatized and made into a motion picture.

Dreiser believed in representing life honestly in his fiction. He accomplished this through accurate detail, especially in his descriptions of the urban settings in which many of his stories take place. In his naturalistic portrayals Dreiser saw his characters as victims of social and economic forces, and of fate, all of which conspire against them. The American writer Sinclair Lewis hailed Sister Carrie as “the first book free of English literary influence.” Toward the end of his career, Dreiser, a member of the United States Communist Party, worked to promote his political views. Earlier he had visited the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and, in Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), had offered a sympathetic portrait of the country.

Dreiser's last novels, The Bulwark and The Stoic, appeared posthumously, in 1946 and 1947; in 1983 his autobiographical An Amateur Laborer was published. His other works include Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916), A Hoosier Holiday (1916), Twelve Men (1919), A Book About Myself (1922), The Color of a Great City (1923), Moods (verse, 1926), Chains (1927), A Gallery of Women (1929), Dawn (1931), Tragic America (1932), and America Is Worth Saving (1941).