Theodore Dreiser
American author
born Aug. 27, 1871, Terre Haute, Ind., U.S.
died Dec. 28, 1945, Hollywood, Calif.
Main
novelist who was the outstanding American practitioner of naturalism. He
was the leading figure in a national literary movement that replaced the
observance of Victorian notions of propriety with the unflinching
presentation of real-life subject matter. Among other themes, his novels
explore the new social problems that had arisen in a rapidly
industrializing America.
Life.
Dreiser was the ninth of 10 surviving children in a family whose
perennial poverty forced frequent moves between small Indiana towns and
Chicago in search of a lower cost of living. His father, a German
immigrant, was a mostly unemployed millworker who subscribed to a stern
and narrow Roman Catholicism. His mother’s gentle and compassionate
outlook sprang from her Czech Mennonite background. In later life
Dreiser would bitterly associate religion with his father’s
ineffectuality and the family’s resulting material deprivation, but he
always spoke and wrote of his mother with unswerving affection.
Dreiser’s own harsh experience of poverty as a youth and his early
yearnings for wealth and success would become dominant themes in his
novels, and the misadventures of his brothers and sisters in early adult
life gave him additional material on which to base his characters.
Dreiser’s spotty education in parochial and public schools was capped
by a year (1889–90) at Indiana University. He began a career as a
newspaper reporter in Chicago in 1892 and worked his way to the East
Coast. While writing for a Pittsburgh newspaper in 1894, he read works
by the scientists T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall and adopted the
speculations of the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Through these readings
and his own experience, Dreiser came to believe that human beings are
helpless in the grip of instincts and social forces beyond their
control, and he judged human society as an unequal contest between the
strong and the weak. In 1894 Dreiser arrived in New York City, where he
worked for several newspapers and contributed to magazines. He married
Sara White in 1898, but his roving affections (and resulting
infidelities) doomed their relationship. The couple separated
permanently in 1912.
Dreiser began writing his first novel, Sister Carrie, in 1899 at the
suggestion of a newspaper colleague. Doubleday, Page and Company
published it the following year, thanks in large measure to the
enthusiasm of that firm’s reader, the novelist Frank Norris. But
Doubleday’s qualms about the book, the story line of which involves a
young kept woman whose “immorality” goes unpunished, led the publisher
to limit the book’s advertising, and consequently it sold fewer than 500
copies. This disappointment and an accumulation of family and marital
troubles sent Dreiser into a suicidal depression from which he was
rescued in 1901 by his brother, Paul Dresser, a well-known songwriter,
who arranged for Theodore’s treatment in a sanitarium. Dreiser recovered
his spirits, and in the next nine years he achieved notable financial
success as an editor in chief of several women’s magazines. He was
forced to resign in 1910, however, because of an office imbroglio
involving his romantic fascination with an assistant’s daughter.
Somewhat encouraged by the earlier response to Sister Carrie in
England and the novel’s republication in America, Dreiser returned to
writing fiction. The reception accorded his second novel, Jennie
Gerhardt (1911), the story of a woman who submits sexually to rich and
powerful men to help her poverty-stricken family, lent him further
encouragement. The first two volumes of a projected trilogy of novels
based on the life of the American transportation magnate Charles T.
Yerkes, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), followed. Dreiser
recorded his experiences on a trip to Europe in A Traveler at Forty
(1913). In his next major novel, The ‘Genius’ (1915), he transformed his
own life and numerous love affairs into a sprawling semiautobiographical
chronicle that was censured by the New York Society for the Suppression
of Vice. There ensued 10 years of sustained literary activity during
which Dreiser produced a short-story collection, Free and Other Stories
(1918); a book of sketches, Twelve Men (1919); philosophical essays,
Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1920); a rhapsodic description of New York, The Color
of A Great City (1923); works of drama, including Plays of the Natural
and Supernatural (1916) and The Hand of the Potter (1918); and the
autobiographical works A Hoosier Holiday (1916) and A Book About Myself
(1922).
In 1925 Dreiser’s first novel in a decade, An American Tragedy, based
on a celebrated murder case, was published. This book brought Dreiser a
degree of critical and commercial success he had never before attained
and would not thereafter equal. The book’s highly critical view of the
American legal system also made him the adopted champion of social
reformers. He became involved in a variety of causes and slackened his
literary production. A visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 produced a
skeptical critique of that communist society entitled Dreiser Looks at
Russia (1928). His only other significant publications in the late 1920s
were collections of stories and sketches written earlier, Chains (1927)
and A Gallery of Women (1929), and an unsuccessful collection of poetry,
Moods, Cadenced and Declaimed (1926).
The Great Depression of the 1930s ended Dreiser’s prosperity and
intensified his commitment to social causes. He came to reconsider his
opposition to communism and wrote the anticapitalist Tragic America
(1931). His only important literary achievement in this decade was the
autobiography of his childhood and teens, Dawn (1931), one of the most
candid self-revelations by any major writer. In the middle and late ’30s
his growing social consciousness and his interest in science converged
to produce a vaguely mystical philosophy.
In 1938 Dreiser moved from New York to Los Angeles with Helen
Richardson, who had been his mistress since 1920. There he set about
marketing the film rights to his earlier works. In 1942 he began
belatedly to rewrite The Bulwark, a novel begun in 1912. The task was
completed in 1944, the same year he married Helen. (Sara White Dreiser
had died in 1942.) One of his last acts was to join the American
Communist Party. Helen helped him complete most of The Stoic, the
long-postponed third volume of his Yerkes trilogy, in the weeks before
his death. Both The Bulwark and The Stoic were published posthumously
(1946 and 1947, respectively). A collection of Dreiser’s philosophical
speculations, Notes on Life, appeared in 1974.
Works
Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), is a work of pivotal
importance in American literature despite its inauspicious launching. It
became a beacon to subsequent American writers whose allegiance was to
the realistic treatment of any and all subject matter. Sister Carrie
tells the story of a rudderless but pretty small-town girl who comes to
the big city filled with vague ambitions. She is used by men and uses
them in turn to become a successful Broadway actress while George
Hurstwood, the married man who has run away with her, loses his grip on
life and descends into beggary and suicide. Sister Carrie was the first
masterpiece of the American naturalistic movement in its grittily
factual presentation of the vagaries of urban life and in its ingenuous
heroine, who goes unpunished for her transgressions against conventional
sexual morality. The book’s strengths include a brooding but
compassionate view of humanity, a memorable cast of characters, and a
compelling narrative line. The emotional disintegration of Hurstwood is
a much-praised triumph of psychological analysis.
Dreiser’s second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), is a lesser
achievement than Sister Carrie owing to its heroine’s comparative lack
of credibility. Based on Dreiser’s remembrance of his beloved mother,
Jennie emerges as a plaster saint with whom most modern readers find it
difficult to empathize. The novel’s strengths include stinging
characterizations of social snobs and narrow “religionists,” as well as
a deep sympathy for the poor.
The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914) are the first two novels of
a trilogy dealing with the career of the late-19th century American
financier and traction tycoon Charles T. Yerkes, who is cast in
fictionalized form as Frank Cowperwood. As Cowperwood successfully plots
monopolistic business coups first in Philadelphia and then in Chicago,
the focus of the novels alternates between his amoral business dealings
and his marital and other erotic relations. The Financier and The Titan
are important examples of the business novel and represent probably the
most meticulously researched and documented studies of high finance in
first-rate fiction. Cowperwood, like all of Dreiser’s major characters,
remains unfulfilled despite achieving most of his apparent wishes. The
third novel in the trilogy, The Stoic (1947), is fatally weakened by
Dreiser’s diminished interest in his protagonist.
The ‘Genius’ (1915) is artistically one of Dreiser’s least successful
novels but is nonetheless indispensable to an understanding of his
psychology. This book chronicles its autobiographical hero’s career as
an artist and his unpredictable pursuit of the perfect woman as a source
of ultimate fulfillment.
Dreiser’s longest novel, An American Tragedy (1925), is a complex and
compassionate account of the life and death of a young antihero named
Clyde Griffiths. The novel begins with Clyde’s blighted background,
recounts his path to success, and culminates in his apprehension, trial,
and execution for murder. The book was called by one influential critic
“the worst-written great novel in the world,” but its questionable
grammar and style are transcended by its narrative power. Dreiser’s
labyrinthine speculations on the extent of Clyde’s guilt do not blunt
his searing indictment of materialism and the American dream of success.
Dreiser’s next-to-last novel, The Bulwark (1946), is the story of a
Quaker father’s unavailing struggle to shield his children from the
materialism of modern American life. More intellectually consistent than
Dreiser’s earlier novels, this book also boasts some of his most
polished prose.
Assessment.
Dreiser’s considerable stature, beyond his historic importance as a
pioneer of unvarnished truth-telling in modern literature, is due almost
entirely to his achievements as a novelist. His sprawling imagination
and cumbersome style kept him from performing well in the smaller
literary forms, and his nonfiction writing, especially his essays, are
marred by intellectual inconsistency, a lack of objectivity, and even
bitterness. But these latter traits are much less obtrusive in his
novels, where his compassion and empathy for human striving make his
best work moving and memorable. The long novel gave Dreiser the prime
form through which to explore in depth the possibilities of 20th-century
American life, with its material profusion and spiritual doubt.
Dreiser’s characters struggle for self-realization in the face of
society’s narrow and repressive moral conventions, and they often obtain
material success and erotic gratification while a more enduring
spiritual satisfaction eludes them. Despite Dreiser’s alleged
deficiencies as a stylist, his novels succeed in their accumulation of
realistic detail and in the power and integrity with which they
delineate the tragic aspects of the American pursuit of worldly success.
Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy are certainly enduring works of
literature that display a deep understanding of the American experience
around the turn of the century, with its expansive desires and pervasive
disillusionments.
Lawrence E. Hussman
