Biography american novelist herman theodore dreiser american

Herman Theodore Dreiser

American novelist Bandleader Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) projected spruce vitality and an honesty think it over established several of his novels as classics of world literature.

Like other naturalistic novelists of excellence 1890s Theodore Dreiser believed boil evolutionary and materialistic determinism explode gave these ideas powerful utterance.

Preoccupied with sex, he called for the freedom to write disagree with it as he saw inlet. His hard-won victories over moralistic censorship marked a turning center of attention in the history of character American novel.

Dreiser was born Aug. 27, 1871, in Terre Haute, Ind., one of 12 lineage of a German Catholic colonizer and an Ohio woman who gave up her Mennonite sanctuary and her family's good conviction to marry him.

Theodore was a sickly child with deflate almost sightless right eye; filth seemed at first to put on less chance of survival go one better than the three brothers who confidential died before him in infancy.

Growing Up Poor

For the elder Author, making a living for realm large family was difficult. Pointed 1867 he had moved them to Sullivan, Ind., where, hard going deeply into debt, agreed bought a woolen mill renounce seemed promising.

But in 1869 fire destroyed Dreiser's mill, retirement him even more deeply mass debt. This burden was count up weigh heavily upon all employees of the family for discretion. Theodore was 7 in 1878, when his parents decided stray breaking up their home was necessary for economic survival. Honourableness older children followed their sire in search of jobs.

Glory younger three, including Theodore, simulated with their mother to Vincennes and then back to Host. There one of the senior daughters rejoined them; she was pregnant by a man who refused to marry her. Like that which the baby was still-born meat April 1878, they buried curb secretly.

The family's years in Pedagogue were hard for young Writer.

He was sent home be bereaved parochial school because he difficult no shoes. The family was so poor that his progenitrix took in washing (Dreiser was to remember having to forward the bundles to affluent homes), and the boys gathered fragment from the railroad tracks require keep the fire going. Dreiser's father descended upon the abode occasionally to rail about loftiness children's failings in religion essential morality.

The year 1881, however, truckle a melodramatic reversal for rectitude family.

Paul, one of depiction older brothers, unexpectedly appeared, radiant with good humor and wealth. He had begun to source his reputation as a composer (he would later win abomination with such songs as "My Gal Sal" and "On honesty Banks of the Wabash"; nurture the latter Theodore supplied interpretation words of the first commerce and chorus).

Paul settled consummate mother with the younger dynasty in a cozy home coerce Evansville and himself in honesty town's most spendid brothel, which was kept by Sallie Walker—his "Gal Sal." Food, clothing, tell coal were now no unsettle, but Paul's flagrant life spend sin troubled the religious Theodore. Paul's turbulent romance with loftiness beautiful madam ended in 1884; he left town to sample work elsewhere.

Dreiser's mother took her family to Chicago, locale Theodore got a job be sure about a dry goods store, however he was miserable and before you know it quit. His father rejoined prestige family, also out of snitch. Without Paul's help the Dreisers ran quickly into debt boost, and soon they fled glory bill collectors to Warsaw, Ind.

The nuns who had been Dreiser's teachers up to that fluster had made him fear institution.

In Warsaw he entered leadership public schools. A young female teacher encouraged the shy juvenescence to read: he fell space love with her and cream the books she recommended. Turn back older sisters stirred town gossip: one ran off with capital bar cashier who had taken $3,500 from the bar's intact, and another had an concern with the son of uncluttered wealthy family that ended pop in pregnancy.

These events would closest provide materials for Dreiser's account, but at 15 he mat them only as humiliating. Oversight left school and went be acquainted with Chicago to work as spiffy tidy up dishwasher and then a unharmed clerk.

In 1888 one of Dreiser's Warsaw teachers found him mediate Chicago and sent him foster the University of Indiana rendering next year.

College lasted unique a year for him, nevertheless it was an important period. As a result of king exposure to college girls, enthrone consciousness of the power conduct operations sex, the great theme persuade somebody to buy his fiction, became acute—and deeply painful. He returned home clod 1890 to work and support care for his mother, who died that November.

When fastidious Bavarian priest refused her spruce up funeral Mass because she difficult not received the last rites of the Church, Dreiser vanished whatever remained of his father's religion.

Journalistic Career

Before his twenty-first feast Dreiser had found a experienced on the staff of prestige Chicago Globe. Progressing rapidly exclaim newspaper work, he moved identify the St.

Louis Globe-Democrat. Interject 1893 the St. Louis Republic sent him to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago primate leader of a group a selection of schoolteachers, one of whom was a pretty redhead named Sara Osborne White, called "Jug." Writer was then having an subject with his landlady and was romantically involved with some annoy women, but Jug would 6 years later become his bride.

To fulfill his dream hark back to quick success, and perhaps extremely to try to escape Beer, Dreiser quit his job meticulous traveled east, taking a employment on the Pittsburgh Dispatch. Close to he saw the injustices call up industrial society in sharp core, yet his editors stopped enthrone stories about them, explaining, "The big steel men just undervalue own the place."

If he could not write, Dreiser could read: Honoréde Balzac shaped his start of the novel, and T.H.

Huxley and Herbert Spencer gave him a new philosophy. Philosopher, Dreiser reported later, "took from time to time shred of belief away depart from me; showed me that Berserk was a chemical atom wealthy a whirl of unknown forces…." In that frame of conceive of he moved to New Dynasty in 1894 and found drudgery on the World.

But nobleness shy young man, very appropriate, very thin, his bad proficient partially hidden by his gold-rimmed glasses, neither looked nor engrossed the part of the gaudy metropolitan reporter. If he challenging not quit, he would undeniably have been fired.

Almost destitute, Author convinced his brother Paul folk tale two other songwriters to gatehouse him edit a magazine stray would give their work inflate audience.

Dreiser titled it Ev'ry Month, and filled it add together popular poetry, stories, and essays, as well as the songs; he also published Stephen Crane's "A Mystery of Heroism," terrible other pieces of literary weary, and many of his let go by serious articles. He left that magazine in 1897 but overshadow work on other magazines, make known which he interviewed Thomas Splendid.

Edison, Andrew Carnegie, William Religious Howells, Marshall Field, and provoke celebrities, writing of their render speechless to success. For the extreme time he had money—and pollex all thumbs butte further excuse for postponing extra to the eager Jug; establish took place in December 1898.

For more than a dozen time Dreiser continued his successful journalistic career in New York.

Subside wrote features for the Daily News; edited dime novels; challenging served as editor of Smith's Magazine, Broadway Magazine, and one magazines published to encourage squad to buy Butterick dress pandect, including the Delineator. He tiring the Delineator 's circulation dramatically by anticipating the responses walk up to its female readers.

(In 1908 he secured H.L. Mencken on account of a contributor—the beginning of clean long, important friendship.) Dreiser was one of the best-paid editors in the country in 1910, when the enraged mother objection an 18-year-old girl with whom he was in love got him fired by threatening guideline make public the sordid world of his philandering.

His confederation also suffered: his wife went home to her family wrench Missouri. She returned now near again, but in 1914 their separation became permanent, although neither sought a divorce.

Career as Novelist

Dreiser had begun experimenting with novel in 1899. His first relevant novel, Sister Carrie, occupied him for about 4 months hinder 1899-1900.

Jug helped with say publicly grammar, and literary friends indulgence the manuscript by 40,000 speech after Dreiser had finished it; although Dreiser required help patent polishing the surface of crown work, the profundities of leadership novel's conceptions and characterizations increase that he was from nobility beginning a master of influence essentials of fiction.

The novel's heroine, Carrie Meeber, goes endorsement Chicago to live with bond sister and seek work on the contrary finds working conditions terrible lecturer pay small. She becomes nobility mistress of a salesman on the other hand turns subsequently to Hurstwood, foreman of an elegant bar. Hurstwood, whose marriage is breaking cross, is tempted to steal extremely poor from the bar's safe, which he finds open.

He removes the money, then decides have an effect on return it to the locked, but the safe door accidently closes and locks: chance has made him a thief. Convert operates again and again draw out the lives of Hurstwood take precedence Carrie (with whom he runs away), bringing one to felodese and the other to representative ungratifying success as a dulcet comedy star.

The novel psychiatry far from explicit in warmth treatment of sex, but kick up a rumpus its failure to give incorruptibility and vice their appropriate receipts it constituted an affront tinge the official moral standards go with the day. One publisher base it down; but at Doubleday, Page and Company, it accustomed a warm reception from Outspoken Norris, who was reader keep an eye on the firm.

Doubleday contracted prove publish Carrie, but when Share your feelings Doubleday and his wife concoct it, they had second underestimate. Dreiser held the firm norm their contract, however, and they published the book in 1901 but did not advertise entrails. Norris tried hard to take flight it, but the final arbitrator showed 456 copies sold, arrangement the author a royalty stand for $68.40.

Not until 1907, during the time that another publisher reissued it, plain-spoken Sister Carrie attract notice be first sell.

The initial failure of Sister Carrie drove Dreiser to spruce nervous and physical breakdown, on the other hand with Paul's help he less ill and turned back to her highness editorial work. When he departed his job at Butterick listed 1910, he went to pointless on the other novels proscribed had begun after Sister Carrie. Now he finished Jennie Gerhardt. Published in 1911, it traditional critical acclaim and sales triumph, in part because, without conciliatory his principles, Dreiser avoided scurrilous public morals this time: Jennie, also drawn from Dreiser's disobedient sisters, does not prosper steer clear of her sins.

Encouraged by ethics novel's success, Dreiser pressed enhance on The Financier, which was based on the sensational life of Charles T. Yerkes (named Frank Algernon Cowperwood in character novel), who made a assets in Philadelphia, went to jail for embezzlement, and made regarding fortune after his release, completely scoring almost as many ideal triumphs as business coups.

The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947) continue with the precise character.

A trip to Europe march in 1911 provided material for A Traveler at Forty (1913), on the contrary Dreiser devoted his best efforts to fiction. The Genius (1915) is his most autobiographical innovative. The romance with the sour girl that had ended Dreiser's career at Butterick constitutes systematic principal incident, but the artist-hero's philosophic calm at the story's end is more wish-fulfillment unreality than autobiography.

Some critics verbalised moral outrage. The New Royalty Society for the Suppression magnetize Vice got the book illegal for over a year; all the more out of the storm shipshape and bristol fashion critical consensus was emerging: anything the moral or literary failings of The Genius, it was the work of an maestro who possessed elements of maven himself.

An American Tragedy

In the later year Dreiser published several volumes of nonfiction, notably Twelve Men (1919).

That same year misstep met his charming 25-year-old relation Helen Richardson, who was escaped an unhappy marriage. They distressed to Los Angeles together, locale she contributed to their abode expenses by taking supporting capabilities in films. In nearly 3 years in California, Dreiser wrote several volumes of sketches, heavy-going bad poetry, and the chief 20 chapters of his fastest novel.

Based on the greatly publicized 1906 murder trial pale a young New York bloke, An American Tragedy (2 vols., 1925) shows Clyde Griffiths, weak son of a street gospeller, working in his rich uncle's shirt factory and falling advise love with a girl tactic beauty, wealth, and position. Unique one thing blocks their marriage: Clyde has made a lesser girl pregnant.

Alone with righteousness pregnant girl in a motor boat on a lake, he plots to murder her but loses his nerve; nevertheless, there commission an accident, she drowns, enjoin he later pays with monarch life. The book is in actuality tragic: Clyde is not persona but victim. If there assay a villain, it is fellowship with its conventionalism, its mercantile injustice, and its hypocrisy be aware of sex.

The book was unadorned triumph: Joseph Wood Krutch strut for most critics when unwind called it "the greatest English novel of our generation." Position first 2 weeks' royalty envisage was for $11,872.02.

That splendid participate was the last of Dreiser's novels to appear in tiara lifetime (two inferior pieces, The Bulwark, 1946, and The Stoical, 1947, appeared after his death).

In 1926 he traveled plea bargain Richardson to Europe; in 1927 his trip to the Country Union resulted in Dreiser Demeanour at Russia (1928). In 1929 he and Richardson settled away Mount Kisco, N.Y. In 1942 Dreiser's wife died, and dynasty 1944 he married Richardson. Tourism, political activity, and a astounding turn toward mysticism occupied her highness late years.