Literary Giant: Theodore Dreiser |
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A. General Introductionborn Aug. 27, 1871, Terre Haute, Ind., U.S. died Dec. 28, 1945, Hollywood, Calif. 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. theodore dreiser (1871—1945) was one of America's greatest writers, and its .greatest naturalist writer. He and his characters did not attack the nation's puritanical moral code: they simply ignored it, This attitude shocked the reading public when his first novel, Sister Carrie, came out in 1900. Although we now see it as a masterpiece, it was suppressed until 1912. The heroine, Carrie Meeber, leaves the poverty of her country home and moves to Chicago. She is completely honest about her desire for a better life: clothes, money and social position. Dreiser himself had been born in poverty, and therefore doesn't criticize her for this. Nor does he criticize her relationships with men. Carrie is quite modern in the way she moves from one Dreiser does not forget the basic principles of his naturalism. On the one hand, the author says that "the world only moves forward because of the services of the exceptional individual". But on the other hand, Cowperwood is also a "chessman" of fate. Like Carrie, his success is mostly the result of chance. Dreiser's greatest novel, An American Tragedy (1925), reveals a third stage in his thinking: social consciousness. Much more than in Sister Carrie, he sees his characters as victims of society. Clyde Griffiths, the hero (or "anti-hero"), has the same dream as Carrie: he thinks money and success will bring him happiness. When a pregnant10 girlfriend threatens to destroy this dream, he plans to kill her. At the last moment, he changes his mind, but the girl dies accidentally anyway. Since Clyde had decided not to kill her, is he really responsible for her death? This becomes the main question during his trial. The trial itself is not really fair. The newspapers stir up public anger against him. In the end, Clyde is executed''. Clearly, Dreiser believes that Clyde is not really guilty. Society and its false moral code are far more guilty. Dreiser calls his novel a tragedy, and in certain ways it is similar to classical Greek tragedy. It concentrates on a single individual, which gives it unity; and this individual is eventually destroyed by forces which he cannot control. Dreiser's novels were very long. They were filled with details about factories, banks, cities and business life. Some people complained about his style. There were too many details, they said, and his language was not clear. But nobody could deny his importance. He and his books were like a huge mountain. In a sense this was a problem for younger writers. Each of them had to find his (or her) way around the mountain of Dreiser's naturalism. Some of them rejected the whole tradition of naturalism in literature.
Theodore Dreiser is one of America's greatest writers, and its greatest naturalist writer. With the publication of Sister Carrie in 1900, Dreiser committed his literary force to opening the new ground of American naturalism. His heroes and heroines,his settings, his frank discussion, celebration, and humanization of sex, his clear dissection of the mechanistic brutality of American society. All were new and shocking to a reading public reared on genteel romances and adventure narratives. Jennie Gerhardt,t\\e Cowperwood trilogy .and An American Tragedy expand and clarify those themes introduced in Sister Carrie. Dreiser's genius was recognized and applauded by H. L. Mencken,who encouraged him, praised his works publicly, and was always a valued editorial confidant, but the general reaction to Dreiser has always been negative. B. 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 chara
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