Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser (Terre Haute, Indiana, 1871 - Hollywood, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist associated with literary naturalism. Writing in English in the early twentieth century, he chronicled how the growing industrial city reshaped the lives of young people with little money. He matters because he placed the hunger for social advancement, and its moral price, at the center of American fiction.

He grew up in a large, poor Catholic family that moved often and lived under constant debt. At fifteen he moved to Chicago, where he took menial jobs and taught himself in an uneven way. He spent a year at Indiana University and then turned to newspaper work in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and New York, writing reports and theatre criticism. That hands-on life in the city gave him the raw material for his fiction.

His first novel, Sister Carrie, appeared in 1900 with the encouragement of the writer Frank Norris. It follows a young woman who leaves home for the city, takes up with wealthy men and rises to stardom on the stage, without the story punishing her for it. Its frank treatment of sex brought such harsh criticism that the publisher withdrew it, and it sold very poorly. Dreiser was discouraged but kept writing while editing magazines. His second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, took years to arrive in 1911, and British writers who admired it helped him become a full-time author.

The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914) began a trilogy about Frank Cowperwood, an unscrupulous businessman loosely modeled on a real Chicago tycoon. He then wrote The Genius (1915), which was suppressed for years, and reached his most celebrated book with An American Tragedy (1925). Based on a real murder case, it tells of a weak, ambitious young man who kills his pregnant girlfriend to climb socially. Dreiser presents him less as a villain than as a product of an unjust environment. His prose is slow and heavy with detail, yet often powerful.

In the 1930s he took up social causes, from the Harlan coal strike to the Scottsboro Boys case. He drew close to socialism, visited the Soviet Union and wrote political books that were sympathetic to that system. He joined the Communist Party USA only months before his death. His legacy lies in opening American fiction to criticism of the American Dream and in defending free expression against censorship.