biography
| name: |
Dreiser, Theodore (Herman Albert)
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pronunciation:
[driyzer]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1871–1945)
|
| biography:
| Writer, born in Terre Haute, Indiana, USA. Raised in poverty and in a German-speaking environment, he left home for Chicago at age 16. After a period of odd jobs and a year at the University of Indiana, he became a Midwestern newspaper reporter and, in New York after 1894, a magazine feature writer. Sister Carrie (1900), his first and still highly regarded novel, was withheld from general distribution because of its supposed amorality, and its commercial failure plunged him into financial distress and mental breakdown (1904). He later re-established himself as a magazine editor and self-published a second, successful edition of Sister Carrie (1907). The success of the novel Jennie Gerhardt (1911) allowed him to write full time, and The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914) followed. These novels were ungainly in style but ground-breaking in their naturalism and critique of American capitalist society. The withdrawal from distribution, on moral grounds, of his autobiographical novel, The Genius (1915), ignited a national anti-censorship campaign supported by most of the leading literary figures of the day. His next decade, marked by an energetic output of plays, stories, memoirs, and travel books, culminated in An American Tragedy (1925), a major popular success despite its bleak view of American values. He publicly supported left-wing causes through the 1930s and 1940s, and propounded Socialist ideas in his late works, joining the Communist Party shortly before his death. He had also returned to writing novels, two of which, The Bulwark (1946) and The Stoic (1947), were among his various works published posthumously. As insensitive in his treatment of the English language as he was of many women in his life, he seems destined to survive as a major American writer. |
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