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Theodore (Herman Albert) Dreiser
1871-1945
Novelist, journalist, editor
Evelyn Sung/宋怡緻
 Family Background
Boy-girl Relationships
Career as a journalist and editor
Career as a novelist
Writing Style
Family Background
Theodore Dreiser was born on August 27, 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana. His father, John Paul Dreiser, was a Catholic German immigrant who came to America in 1844. His mother, Sarah Schänäb, was of Bohemian Mennonite background and later became a Catholic by marrying John Paul Dreiser in 1851. As a wool worker, John Dreiser gave the family a prosperous life for a time. However, after the births of six children and a fatal business loss caused by the burning of an uninsured woolen mill, the Dreisers went into a permanent condition of poverty and flight. According to Donald Pizer, "it was a family at the very bottom of social scale—poor, large, ignorant, and superstitious." Poverty, on one hand, deprived Dreiser of an easy access to books (unlike other typical authors, many of whom were college graduates or had the chance of self-education when growing up), but on the other hand, it was poverty he experienced when growing up that supplied him with numerous themes to his novels, especially "the underlying configuration of his family--the warm, forgiving, and loving mother; the narrow-minded, disciplinarian father; and the fun-loving, wayward children"—which formed the fictional families in Dreiser's novels.
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Boy-girl Relationships
Generally speaking, Dreiser's personal life was very active. He married twice and at the interval of these two marriages, incessant relationships with girls flavored Dreiser's personal life. Dreiser first married Sara White, a devoted schoolteacher from Missouri. His relationship with Sara dramatizes the central paradoxes of his novels mainly because they were in love, but Sara's moralism prevented their consummation of love through a six-year engagement. His first marriage primarily ended with his affair with Thelma Cudlipp, the 17-year-old daughter of an editor. Having separated from Sara in the 1910s, Dreiser moved to Greenwich Village, where he had a number of relationships. His "varietistics interests"(his term for his constant need for different women) were only arrested when he met an equally youthful and attractive cousin, Helen Patges Richardson, whom Dreiser lived together with for most of the remainder of his life. It is said that Helen's interest in spiritualism influenced Dreiser's last works such as The Stoic (1947) and The Bulwarkm (1945 ), which emphasized the spiritual side of life.
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Career as a Journalist and Editor
Dreiser was not bright in school, but a few teachers did show serious liking to him. Although the Dreisers were so poor that they had to continuously move from one place to another, with the aid of a schoolteacher, Dreiser attended college at the University of Indiana for one year. His experiences in the college made his goal higher. He worked hard until he was taken as an editor at the Daily Globle. Dreiser also convinced her brother Paul, who had become a popular stage star and songwriter in the entertainment circle, and other two songwriters to let him edit a magazine, which would give their works a wider audience. Dreiser titled the magazine Ev'ry Month, and filled it with popular poetry, stories, essays, songs, some pieces of literary interest and many of his serious articles. He left his magazine in 1897 but found work on other magazines, for which he interviewed Thomas A. Edison, Andrew Carnegie, William Dean Howells, Marshall Field, and other celebrities, and wrote of their rise to success. For the first time he had money in life. He successfully continued his journalistic career for more than a dozen years and was one of the best-paid editors in 1910, when he was having an affair with Thelma Cudlipp.
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Career as a Novelist
Suppression of Sister Carrie
Dreiser had begun experimenting fiction in 1899. His first important novel, Sister Carrie, was based on the experience of his sister, Emma, who had an affair with a married man and fled with him to Canada after he stole money from the safe of his company. Sister Carrie was finished in 4 months; although it was benefited by Sara's help in correcting the grammar and literary friends' aid in polishing the work, the depth of characterization and the novel's conceptions proved Dreiser's talent of being a literary master. However, Sister Carrie was almost refused to be published by Doubleday, Page because Dreiser failed to give vice and virtue appropriate rewards in the completion of the novel. The publication of Sister Carrie, therefore, became one of the famous incidents in American literary history. The publisher later was considered as the symbol of control dominated by puritan ethics in the American society, while Dreiser was elevated as a figure to fight with and persevere under the puritan values.
Suspension and Continuation of his Writing Career
Barely promoted, Sister Carrie did not sell well. Dreiser therefore sank into a deep depression, living poorly in the Brooklyn slum and scavenging food on the street, until he ran into his brother Paul, who sent him to a sanatorium. The sanatorium helped him recover mentally and physically. With a better result of the reprint of Sister Carrie in 1907, Dreiser continued writing his second novel, Jennie Gerhard, which portrayed a fallen woman as a giver, with the image and spirit of feminine plentitude as a mother.
From 1911 to 1925, Dreiser put all his energy into writing, composing four very long novels ( The "Genius," 1915; The Financier, 1912; The Titan, 1914; and An American Tragedy, 1925), works of travel narrative and autobiography, plays, short stories, sketches, and philosophical essays. During his lifetime, his most closet time in winning a major award in literature was the Nobel Prize in 1930 (he was the runner-up), though he finally lost it to Sinclair Lewis, who acknowledged Dreiser in his acceptance speech, "Dreiser more than any other man, marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life. Without his pioneering, I doubt if any of us could, unless we liked to be sent to jail, seek to express life and beauty and terror."
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Writing Style
Spencer's and Balzac's influence
Dreiser's conception of the nature of life was strongly influenced by Herbert Spencer and Honore de Balzac. In 1894, Dreiser stayed in Pittsburgh for half a year and wrote a daily column for the Dispatch. The newspaper work did not take much of his time in a day. Therefore, when he was free, he read voraciously in the public library and was fascinated with the philosophical works of Herbert Spencer and the fiction of Balzac. As Pizer disclosed, Spencerian philosophy "argues that there is no authority in supernaturally sanctioned moral codes, that only that which develops naturally through the struggle for existence, whether this struggle occurs in nature or society, is beneficial. And Balzac's novels... reaffirmed Dreiser's own belief that the seeker will find in the great city not only struggle, degradation, and destruction but also wonder, beauty, and fulfillment." In these two writers' works, he confirmed the impressions of experience he had been acquiring the last several years.
Motifs
Dreiser often wrote "rags-to-riches"stories and handled them based on the issues he had dealt with as a journalist—"crime, disease, prostitution, vagrancy, and the violence and double-dealing behind huge wealth."He was not the first novelist of his generation to write the poverty and violence of the city, but he was the very novelist who really experienced poverty. His personal experiences enabled him to capture precisely the desire to escape poverty and the desire to possess wealth in a society that was in a period of transformation—"the tide of migration from country to city; the impersonal nature of the urban setting of factories, tenements, and department stores; the contrast of poverty and wealth; the new culture of conspicuous consumption"were all at the center of Dreiser's work. Also, writing someone in the reality or personal experiences into his fiction was just like what a journalist did. For example, Sister Carrie was written based on one of his sisters' life; The Financier was based on the Chicago financier Charles T. Yerkes's life; An American Tragedy was based centrally on the murder trial of Chester Gillette.
Criticism
Criticism on Dreiser went to two extremes. First is about Dreiser's command of language and style. While some attacked that his writing was full of "circumlocution, inversion, uncertain vocabulary, and overburdened syntax", other critics considered his writing was singular in giving excited details and recording documented fact. Similar extremity appeared in evaluating themes of Dreiser's novels. Because Dreiser wrote his belief in evolutionary, materialistic determinism, and his preoccupation with sex into his novels, his characters were often motivated by their own selfish impulses and the social class pressures that surrounded them rather than the higher sense of ethics. His works, therefore, often encountered strong reproaches from conservative critics, who spoke for Puritan moralism. However, Dreiser's significance in American literary history had been generally acknowledged because of "his fearlessness, his honesty, his determination to have done with conventional posturings and evasions. It was extremely important that we should have some one bold enough to set down in the English language just as he saw it the unvarnished truth about American business life, American social life in its major reaches, and the sex-psychology of American men and women,"asserted by Joseph Warren Beach, author of The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in Technique.
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