Theodore (Herman Albert) Dreiser

Writer, born in Terre Haute, Indiana, USA. Raised in poverty and in a German-speaking environment, he left home for Chicago at age 16. After a period of odd jobs and a year at the University of Indiana, he became a Midwestern newspaper reporter and, in New York after 1894, a magazine feature writer. Sister Carrie (1900), his first and still highly regarded novel, was withheld from general distribution because of its supposed amorality, and its commercial failure plunged him into financial distress and mental breakdown (1904). He later re-established himself as a magazine editor and self-published a second, successful edition of Sister Carrie (1907). The success of the novel Jennie Gerhardt (1911) allowed him to write full time, and The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914) followed. These novels were ungainly in style but ground-breaking in their naturalism and critique of American capitalist society. The withdrawal from distribution, on moral grounds, of his autobiographical novel, The Genius (1915), ignited a national anti-censorship campaign supported by most of the leading literary figures of the day. His next decade, marked by an energetic output of plays, stories, memoirs, and travel books, culminated in An American Tragedy (1925), a major popular success despite its bleak view of American values. He publicly supported left-wing causes through the 1930s and 1940s, and propounded Socialist ideas in his late works, joining the Communist Party shortly before his death. He had also returned to writing novels, two of which, The Bulwark (1946) and The Stoic (1947), were among his various works published posthumously. As insensitive in his treatment of the English language as he was of many women in his life, he seems destined to survive as a major American writer.

Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 17, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American naturalist author known for dealing with the gritty reality of life.

He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Sarah and John Paul Dreiser, a strict Catholic.

His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), tells the story of a woman who flees her country life for the city (Chicago, Illinois) and falls into a wayward life of sin. Many of Dreiser's subsequent novels dealt with social inequality.

His first commercial success was An American Tragedy (1925), which was made into a film in 1931 and again in 1951.

Other works include the Trilogy of Desire about Frank Cowperwood, a fictionalized version of Charles Yerkes: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (published posthumously in 1947).

In 1935 the library trustees of Warsaw, Indiana ordered the burning of all the library's works by Dreiser.

Dreiser's style is marked by long sentences and intense attention to detail. It should be noted that Dreiser is not well-regarded for his style, but for the realism of his work, character development, and his points-of-view on American life. In his tribute "Dreiser" from Horses and Men (1923), Sherwood Anderson writes:

Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. The fellows of the ink-pots, the prose writers in America who follow Dreiser, will have much to do that he has never done. Their road is long but, because of him, those who follow will never have to face the road through the wilderness of Puritan denial, the road that Dreiser faced alone.

Humorist Corey Ford (writing as "John Riddell") quipped that Dreiser had only one plot: Boy meets Girl = Tragedy.

Renowned mid-century literary critic Irving Howe spoke of Dreiser as "among the American giants, one of the very few American giants we have had."

Politically, Dreiser was involved in several campaigns against social injustice.

Dreiser, a committed socialist, wrote several non-fiction books on political issues. Theodore Dreiser joined the American Communist Party in August 1945, on December 28th he died of heart failure.