Teacher Roster

Author Biographies

Literary Essays

Book Reviews

The Life of Theodore Dreiser

(1871-1945)

Theodore Dreiser was an American naturalist who achieved belated fame for his first novel SISTER CARRIE seven years after its publication. Constantly struggling with controversy, Dreiser would be lambasted for his disregard of the Victorian codes of morality in the same fashion as Thomas Hardy for the duration of his literary career. Dreiser's works contrast the material and emotional needs of humanity with powerful clarity that approaches clairvoyance. This aspect of his work is most apparent in his two most famous novels, the fore mentioned SISTER CARRIE and AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1925), a novel depicting the murder of a pregnant young lower-class woman named Roberta Alden by her lover Clyde Griffiths.

            Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was born in Terre Haute near Sullivan, Indiana, on August 27, 1871. Terre Haute was a blue-collar town struggling to attain economic stability, but forced to stand behind the big steel-producing cities of America due to an inferior supply of ore and an economy driven predominantly by agricultural. John Paul Dreiser, Sr., young Theodore's father, was the manager of a successful woolen mill, while his mother was Sarah Marie Schnapp, a homemaker who devoted her time to her eight children. When Theodore was born, he was the ninth born of a grand total of ten siblings, and his family had hit rock bottom.  In 1864, John Paul's mill had burned down, and he and the rest of the family were sent into abject poverty. While the mill was being reconstructed in a futile attempt to salvage the family business, John Paul suffered a head injury that would make him obsessively Catholic and gullible in business practices. This would only add to the family's long list of problems, and young Theodore was to spend his youth receiving only the bare minimum of a proper education and constantly in the midst of financial worries and religious fanaticism. The experience would possess the young man with a keen eye for the pressures society places on material possessions and accumulated wealth, and it would make him an avowed atheist.

            With the help of a former teacher by the name of Mildred , Theodore was able to attend the Indiana University in1889, where he studied for one year. Despite not having a thorough early education, Dreiser became interested in writing after reading such classic authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Honore de Balzac, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He decided on pursuing a career in journalism initially, and returned to Chicago in 1890. Having been independent of his parents since the age of fifteen, Dreiser had settled down in Chicago and taken a number of low-paying jobs, including dishwasher and hardware store clerk. Following his brief foray at the Indiana University (during which his mother Sarah died), the twenty-one-year-old Dreiser began writing for the Chicago Globe and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat during the 1890s. The jobs provided him with economic stability for the first time in his life, and having had his physiological and security needs met, the young writer began looking for love. He found it in Sara Osborne White, a  schoolteacher from Missouri whom Dreiser had been sent by the Republic, another newspaper he worked for, to escort to the Chicago's World Fair. Sara was an attractive redhead in her forties who was called "Jug" by her friends and family because her hair was so thick and luxurious that it resembled a red jug. They married in 1898 and moved to New York City after Dreiser's brother Paul spoke euphorically and with great enthusiasm of the elephantine metropolis.

            Dreiser's career in journalism thus far had been a mishmash of brief success and failure, but the young aspiring writer was hoping for life-long success rather than instant gratification followed by a failure. While in between jobs, Dreiser began writing the beginnings of a novel, urged on by his friend and fellow writer Arthur Henry. With encouragement from his wife, Dreiser worked on the novel from 1899 to 1900, the year he completed the book. When he sent the manuscript to the Doubleday, Page & Co. publishing house, Frank Doubleday read the work and called it "immoral." His complaints did not end there, however, as Doubleday proceeded to call the novel "poorly written." Doubleday, however, decided to publish the novel after extensive revisions that would edit out all the bad words and all of the recognizable business franchises and labels. He even attempted to retitle the novel "The Training of the Senses" in order to make the book sound more "romantic," but Dreiser was adamant in keeping his first novel's original title, SISTER CARRIE. Doubleday gave in to this, but not without damning the novel's publication by ensuring that the work was not only not poorly advertised, but also excluded from the publishing house's official mail-order catalogue.

            Much of the conservative Frank Doubleday's problems with the novel stemmed from Dreiser's neutral position in the telling of the story. He neither condemned the immoral behavior of his characters nor openly supported it. In fact, he even allowed characters with sinful ways to remain unpunished and even thrive, much like the Marquis de Sade in his popular erotic work, JUSTINE, without ever reaching a moral standing point. This was likely what drove Doubleday to attack SISTER CARRIE so vehemently. Despite his blacklisting of the novel, the work was nevertheless published to critical acclaim. The scandalized published succeeded in making sure the novel would sell poorly, however. Dreiser made little from his first venture into fiction writing. With this financial failing added atop the censorship of his original novel, Dreiser became depressed and suicidal for a long period of time.

            While the novel received little attention upon its first publication, today SISTER CARRIE is considered a classic American novel. It is the story of Carrie Meeber, a young country girl who travels to Chicago in order to pursue a career in  Broadway. Carrie is soon swept into a number of illicit affairs that wise up the naive girl and turn her into a street-smart woman who utilizes her beauty to take advantage of gullible men. Carrie proceeds to drain the life out of her lover George Hurstwood, and while the scarlet woman goes on to a successful career in Broadway, Hurstwood is left to spiral to his eventual suicide. Carrie's ambitious sex life and her metamorphosis from innocent virginal country girl to an urban libertine with no moral constraints understandably was ahead of its time, and Dreiser suffered for his foresightedness by having to wait a number of years before the novel achieved any real success. Until the novel began to sell well and achieve rave reviews upon its re-release in 1907, Dreiser was to live a life of virtually no creative output. The only thing it seems the author managed to accomplish during this period were a number of his own affairs and a falling out between his wife and himself. The two would separate in 1909, and the experience would only add to Dreiser's misery at that point.

            Having begun a second novel in 1901, Dreiser had remained at work on the book for a number of years, but his efforts had been hindered by his depression following the lackluster reception that received SISTER CARRIE. In 1911, following a resurgence in interest in Carrie, Dreiser completed JENNIE GERHARDT, the story of a young woman named Jennie who fatefully falls in love with a U.S. Senator, and realizes she has been greatly mistaken in loving this man. Despite switching over from Doubleday to Harper and Brothers, Dreiser nevertheless was forced to modify his novel. Instead of a social work, JENNIE GERDHARDY became a run-of-the-mill love story. The novel was understandably received with an unenthusiastic critical and commercial response, as were Dreiser's next two novels, THE FINANCIER (1912) and THE TITAN (1914), both entries in a series entitled the Cowperwood trilogy. A precedent had been reestablished in Dreiser's literary career, however, and the novelist was determined not to give up. His fifth novel published was THE GENIUS (1915), a novel depicting an intelligent and misunderstood man who suffers for his ingenuity. The work contained the typical autobiographical sexual content that always raised the eyebrows of editors, and Dreiser had problems getting the novel published.

            Following a number of trips to Europe and a new found interest in social reform, as well as a number of literary ventures that had yet to garner any real fame for the struggling writer, Dreiser became captivated by a murder case that was making the front-page of newspapers across America. The Grace Brown murder had all the makings of a public interest case, and Dreiser took particular interest in how interested all of America was in the brutal murder of a beautiful pregnant young woman by a handsome young man (as would be mimicked some ninety years later in the Scott Peterson case). In 1906, Chester Gillette was charged with murdering his pregnant mistress, Miss Brown. Gillette had brutally beaten the young woman to death with a tennis racket, then dumped into a lake. Following a lengthy trial, the prosecutors gathered enough circumstantial evidence to convict Gillette, and in 1908, he was executed in the electric chair.

            The case was quickly forgotten by the nation, but not by Dreiser. He began writing a novel based on the case in between separate literary ventures, and in 1925, AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY was published. The novel is the story of a bellboy named Clyde Griffins who kills his mistress, Roberta Alden, in order to be free to marry a wealthy socialite by the name of Sondra Finchley. Dreiser attributes Griffins' murder to the fact that society places more importance on social status than true love, and makes the young murderer's plight morbidly relatable. It was this placing of the blame on society as a whole that caused scandal upon the novel's publication, and despite selling very well and receiving rave reviews, AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY was banned in Boston, Massachusetts. It took a number of years of legal battles to finally make the novel legal in the city.

            Following the publication of AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY was a travel monologue by the name of DREISER LOOKS AT RUSSIA (1928), in which the novelist sympathizes with the Communists. The work had the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the time, the infamous J. Edgar Hoover, up in arms. He had Dreiser closely watched, as would later happen to Arthur Miller years later during the cold war when McCarthyism became a disease among politicians and the FBI. Dreiser's personal life at this time was as shaky as his involvement in politics. Always obsessed with sex, Dreiser would remarry in 1944 after the death of his first wife in 1942, but continue to carry on a number of affairs outside of the marriage. His infidelities occasionally became public knowledge, and this added with his support of the Soviet Union made Dreiser a figure of controversy in the United States. Accusations of his plagiarizing both Sherwood Anderson and the wife of Sinclair Lewis would also land Dreiser's name in the paper, but while the former blew away rather quickly due to a friendship between Anderson and Dreiser, the latter ended in considerable scandal. Dreiser ended up slapping the Nobel Prize-winning Lewis twice in the face during a fancy dinner at the Metropolitan Club in 1931.

            Dreiser's remaining years as a writer centered around social reform, strong opposition to America's involvement in World War II, and a number of novels that, while critically acclaimed as the majority of Dreiser's work following AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY were, did not achieve the same amount of commercial and critical success of AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY. Undeterred, Dreiser continued until the last few years of his life and preaching social reform, and in 1945, he joined the Communist Party in protest against U.S. involvement in Europe. Only a few months after this action, however, Theodore Dreiser died at the age of seventy-four.

The Works of Theodore Dreiser