Theodore Dreiser

(click to enlarge)
Theodore Dreiser. (credit: The Granger Collection, New York)

(born Aug. 27, 1871, Terre Haute, Ind., U.S. — died Dec. 28, 1945, Hollywood, Calif.) U.S. novelist. Born to poor German immigrant parents, Dreiser left home at age 15 for Chicago. He worked as a journalist, and in 1894 he moved to New York, where he had a successful career as a magazine editor and publisher. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), about a young kept woman who goes unpunished for her transgressions, was denounced as scandalous. His subsequent novels would confirm his reputation as the outstanding American practitioner of naturalism. After the success of Jennie Gerhardt (1911), he began writing full-time, producing a trilogy consisting of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (published 1947), which was followed by The Genius (1915) and its sequel, The Bulwark (published 1946). An American Tragedy (1925), based on a murder trial and itself the basis for the 1931 film by that name and for a 1951 film entitled A Place in the Sun, made him a hero among social reformers.

For more information on Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser, visit Britannica.com.

American novelist Herman Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) projected a vitality and an honesty that established several of his novels as classics of world literature.

Like other naturalistic novelists of the 1890s Theodore Dreiser believed in evolutionary and materialistic determinism and gave these ideas powerful expression. Preoccupied with sex, he demanded the freedom to write about it as he saw fit. His hard-won victories over narrow-minded censorship marked a turning point in the history of the American novel.

Dreiser was born Aug. 27, 1871, in Terre Haute, Ind., one of 12 children of a German Catholic immigrant and an Ohio woman who gave up her Mennonite religion and her family's good opinion to marry him. Theodore was a sickly child with an almost sightless right eye; he seemed at first to have less chance of survival than the three brothers who had died before him in infancy.

Growing Up Poor

For the elder Dreiser, making a living for his large family was difficult. In 1867 he had moved them to Sullivan, Ind., where, by going deeply into debt, he bought a woolen mill that seemed promising. But in 1869 fire destroyed Dreiser's mill, leaving him even more deeply in debt. This burden was to weigh heavily upon all members of the family for years. Theodore was 7 in 1878, when his parents decided that breaking up their home was necessary for economic survival. The older children followed their father in search of jobs. The younger three, including Theodore, moved with their mother to Vincennes and then back to Sullivan. There one of the older daughters rejoined them; she was pregnant by a man who refused to marry her. When the baby was still-born in April 1878, they buried it secretly.

The family's years in Sullivan were hard for young Dreiser. He was sent home from parochial school because he had no shoes. The family was so poor that his mother took in washing (Dreiser was to remember having to deliver the bundles to affluent homes), and the boys gathered coal from the railroad tracks to keep the fire going. Dreiser's father descended upon the household occasionally to rail about the children's failings in religion and morality.

The year 1881, however, brought a melodramatic reversal for the family. Paul, one of the older brothers, unexpectedly appeared, beaming with good humor and opulence. He had begun to establish his reputation as a songwriter (he would later win fame with such songs as "My Gal Sal" and "On the Banks of the Wabash"; for the latter Theodore supplied the words of the first stanza and chorus). Paul settled his mother with the younger children in a cozy home in Evansville and himself in the town's most spendid brothel, which was kept by Sallie Walker - his "Gal Sal." Food, clothing, and coal were now no problem, but Paul's flagrant life of sin troubled the religious Theodore. Paul's turbulent romance with the beautiful madam ended in 1884; he left town to seek work elsewhere. Dreiser's mother took her family to Chicago, where Theodore got a job in a dry goods store, but he was miserable and soon quit. His father rejoined the family, also out of work. Without Paul's help the Dreisers ran quickly into debt again, and soon they fled the bill collectors to Warsaw, Ind.

The nuns who had been Dreiser's teachers up to that time had made him fear school. In Warsaw he entered the public schools. A young woman teacher encouraged the shy boy to read: he fell in love with her and with the books she recommended. Again older sisters stirred town gossip: one ran off with a bar cashier who had stolen $3,500 from the bar's safe, and another had an affair with the son of a wealthy family that ended in pregnancy. These events would later provide materials for Dreiser's fiction, but at 15 he felt them only as humiliating. He left school and went to Chicago to work as a dishwasher and then a stock clerk.

In 1888 one of Dreiser's Warsaw teachers found him in Chicago and sent him to the University of Indiana the next year. College lasted only a year for him, but it was an important year. As a result of his exposure to college girls, his consciousness of the power of sex, the great theme of his fiction, became acute - and acutely painful. He returned home in 1890 to work and help care for his mother, who died that November. When a Bavarian priest refused her a funeral Mass because she had not received the last rites of the Church, Dreiser lost whatever remained of his father's religion.

Journalistic Career

Before his twenty-first birthday Dreiser had found a job on the staff of the Chicago Globe. Progressing rapidly in newspaper work, he moved to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. In 1893 the St. Louis Republic sent him to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago as leader of a group of schoolteachers, one of whom was a pretty redhead named Sara Osborne White, called "Jug." Dreiser was then having an affair with his landlady and was romantically involved with some other women, but Jug would 6 years later become his wife. To fulfill his dream of quick success, and perhaps also to try to escape Jug, Dreiser quit his job and traveled east, taking a job on the Pittsburgh Dispatch. There he saw the injustices of industrial society in sharp focus, yet his editors stopped his stories about them, explaining, "The big steel men just about own the place."

If he could not write, Dreiser could read: Honoréde Balzac shaped his conception of the novel, and T.H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer gave him a new philosophy. Spencer, Dreiser reported later, "took every shred of belief away from me; showed me that I was a chemical atom in a whirl of unknown forces…." In that frame of mind he moved to New York in 1894 and found work on the World. But the shy young man, very tall, very thin, his bad eye partially hidden by his gold-rimmed glasses, neither looked nor acted the part of the brash metropolitan reporter. If he had not quit, he would surely have been fired.

Almost destitute, Dreiser convinced his brother Paul and two other songwriters to let him edit a magazine that would give their work wider audience. Dreiser titled it Ev'ry Month, and filled it with popular poetry, stories, and essays, as well as the songs; he also published Stephen Crane's "A Mystery of Heroism," some other pieces of literary interest, and many of his own serious articles. He left this 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, writing of their rise to success. For the first time he had money - and no further excuse for postponing marriage to the eager Jug; it took place in December 1898.

For more than a dozen years Dreiser continued his successful journalistic career in New York. He wrote features for the Daily News; edited dime novels; and served as editor of Smith's Magazine, Broadway Magazine, and three magazines published to encourage women to buy Butterick dress patterns, including the Delineator. He raised the Delineator 's circulation dramatically by anticipating the responses of its female readers. (In 1908 he secured H.L. Mencken as a contributor - the beginning of a long, important friendship.) Dreiser was one of the best-paid editors in the country in 1910, when the enraged mother of an 18-year-old girl with whom he was in love got him fired by threatening to make public the sordid history of his philandering. His marriage also suffered: his wife went home to her family in Missouri. She returned now and again, but in 1914 their separation became permanent, although neither sought a divorce.

Career as Novelist

Dreiser had begun experimenting with fiction in 1899. His first important novel, Sister Carrie, occupied him for about 4 months in 1899-1900. Jug helped with the grammar, and literary friends reduced the manuscript by 40,000 words after Dreiser had finished it; although Dreiser required help in polishing the surface of his work, the profundities of the novel's conceptions and characterizations prove that he was from the beginning a master of the essentials of fiction. The novel's heroine, Carrie Meeber, goes to Chicago to live with her sister and seek work but finds working conditions terrible and pay small. She becomes the mistress of a salesman but turns subsequently to Hurstwood, manager of an elegant bar. Hurstwood, whose marriage is breaking up, is tempted to steal money from the bar's safe, which he finds open. He removes the money, then decides to return it to the safe, but the safe door accidently closes and locks: chance has made him a thief. Chance operates again and again in the lives of Hurstwood and Carrie (with whom he runs away), bringing one to suicide and the other to an ungratifying success as a musical comedy star. The novel is far from explicit in its treatment of sex, but in its failure to give virtue and vice their appropriate rewards it constituted an affront to the official moral standards of the day. One publisher turned it down; but at Doubleday, Page and Company, it received a warm reception from Frank Norris, who was reader for the firm. Doubleday contracted to publish Carrie, but when Frank Doubleday and his wife read it, they had second thoughts. Dreiser held the firm to their contract, however, and they published the book in 1901 but did not advertise it. Norris tried hard to publicize it, but the final tally showed 456 copies sold, giving the author a royalty of $68.40. Not until 1907, when another publisher reissued it, did Sister Carrie attract notice and sell.

The initial failure of Sister Carrie drove Dreiser to a nervous and physical breakdown, but with Paul's help he recovered and turned back to his editorial work. When he lost his job at Butterick in 1910, he went to work on the other novels he had begun after Sister Carrie. Now he finished Jennie Gerhardt. Published in 1911, it received critical acclaim and sales success, in part because, without compromising his principles, Dreiser avoided affronting public morals this time: Jennie, also drawn from Dreiser's wayward sisters, does not prosper from her sins. Encouraged by the novel's success, Dreiser pressed ahead on The Financier, which was based on the sensational career of Charles T. Yerkes (named Frank Algernon Cowperwood in the novel), who made a fortune in Philadelphia, went to prison for embezzlement, and made another fortune after his release, while scoring almost as many romantic triumphs as business coups. The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947) continue with the same character.

A trip to Europe in 1911 provided material for A Traveler at Forty (1913), but Dreiser devoted his best efforts to fiction. The Genius (1915) is his most autobiographical novel. The romance with the young girl that had ended Dreiser's career at Butterick constitutes a principal incident, but the artist-hero's philosophic calm at the story's end is more wish-fulfillment fantasy than autobiography. Some critics expressed moral outrage. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice got the book banned for over a year; yet out of the storm a critical consensus was emerging: whatever the moral or literary failings of The Genius, it was the work of an artist who possessed elements of genius himself.

An American Tragedy

In the following year Dreiser published several volumes of nonfiction, notably Twelve Men (1919). That same year he met his charming 25-year-old cousin Helen Richardson, who was fleeing an unhappy marriage. They moved to Los Angeles together, where she contributed to their household expenses by taking supporting parts in films. In nearly 3 years in California, Dreiser wrote several volumes of sketches, some bad poetry, and the first 20 chapters of his greatest novel. Based on the highly publicized 1906 murder trial of a young New York man, An American Tragedy (2 vols., 1925) shows Clyde Griffiths, impoverished son of a street evangelist, working in his rich uncle's shirt factory and falling in love with a girl of beauty, wealth, and position. Only one thing blocks their marriage: Clyde has made a factory girl pregnant. Alone with the pregnant girl in a boat on a lake, he plots to murder her but loses his nerve; nevertheless, there is an accident, she drowns, and he later pays with his life. The book is genuinely tragic: Clyde is not villain but victim. If there is a villain, it is society with its conventionalism, its economic injustice, and its hypocrisy about sex. The book was a triumph: Joseph Wood Krutch spoke for most critics when he called it "the greatest American novel of our generation." The first 2 weeks' royalty check was for $11,872.02.

That splendid success was the last of Dreiser's novels to appear in his lifetime (two inferior pieces, The Bulwark, 1946, and The Stoic, 1947, appeared after his death). In 1926 he traveled with Richardson to Europe; in 1927 his trip to the Soviet Union resulted in Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928). In 1929 he and Richardson settled near Mount Kisco, N.Y. In 1942 Dreiser's wife died, and in 1944 he married Richardson. Travel, political activity, and a surprising turn toward mysticism occupied his late years. When he died of a heart attack in Hollywood, Calif., on Dec. 28, 1945, he was already well established in the history of world literature. Distinguished films were made in 1951 of An American Tragedy (under the title A Place in the Sun) and Sister Carrie.

Further Reading

Dreiser's autobiographical works include A Hoosier Holiday (1916), A Book about Myself (1922), and Dawn (1931). W.A. Swanberg's admirable Dreiser (1965) is the standard biography, but Robert H. Elias, Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature (1949), remains valuable for its critical emphasis. Charles Shapiro, Theodore Dreiser: Our Bitter Patriot (1962); John J. McAleer, Theodore Dreiser: An Introduction and Interpretation (1968); and Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers (1969), are full-length discussions of the novels. Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (1966), contains a brilliant assessment of Dreiser's accomplishments and relation to his period.

(1871-1945), author. Dreiser was the foremost American literary naturalist and author of two of the most significant works of early-twentieth-century American fiction, Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925). He was raised in a large and poor Catholic family (his father was German-born) in various Indiana towns. After arriving in Chicago in his teens, he worked at menial jobs ranging from stock clerk to laundry truck driver until he broke into newspaper reporting in 1892. After almost a decade of successful work as a reporter in St. Louis and Pittsburgh, as an editor of the New York magazine Ev'ry Month, and as a free-lance magazine writer in New York, Dreiser in late 1899 began his first novel, Sister Carrie. Set in Chicago and New York, the work is remarkable for its amoral yet sympathetic portrayal of the role of female sexuality in the rise of its heroine and for its rendering of the complex union of chance, character, and place in the fall of its male protagonist, Hurstwood. Although Sister Carrie was published, its publisher failed to promote the work because of its contents--an incident that Dreiser and such later supporters as H. L. Mencken made infamous as an example of the power of puritanical ideas in America.

Dreiser went into a decline after the publication of the novel (his unsuccessful marriage to Sara White in 1898 contributed to his breakdown), and it was not until 1904 that he again took up literary work. He edited a magazine in New York and then, in 1910, wrote his second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911). There followed a remarkable decade and a half of literary productivity, during which Dreiser published fourteen substantial books of fiction, plays, autobiography, travel writing, sketches, and philosophical essays. Among the most important of these books were the first two novels of his Cowperwood trilogy, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), which recount in great detail the rise to power of a ruthless late-nineteenth-century American financial tycoon. This period was capped by Dreiser's masterpiece, An American Tragedy, a novel based on an upstate New York murder some twenty years earlier. An American Tragedy powerfully expresses Dreiser's naturalistic conviction that many individuals are so severely conditioned by the circumstances of their parentage and social background that they have little responsibility for their natures or actions. The work is also a striking indictment of the American myth of success, since its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is disastrously impelled by the myth to pursue wealth and position despite his lack of strength and ability.

Dreiser always thought of himself as a man of ideas--he had been deeply affected, for example, by Herbert Spencer's evolutionary thought and by Freud's theories--and he devoted the last two decades of his life to philosophical speculation. But like many American writers of the late 1920s and the 1930s, he was also increasingly drawn into social activism and support of the far Left. These interests culminated not long before his death in his joining the Communist party in 1945 and completing his long-delayed last two novels, The Bulwark (1946) and The Stoic (1947), works in which he expressed his final ideas about the relationship of spirit to matter in humanity and in the universe.

Bibliography:

Donald Pizer, The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study (1976); W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (1965).

Author:

Donald Pizer

See also Literature.

Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1933
Born	August 27, 1871(1871-08-27) Terre Haute, Indiana
Died	December 28, 1945 (aged 74) Hollywood, California
Occupation	novelist
Spouse(s)	Sara White
Parents	Sarah and John Paul Dreiser

Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist. He pioneered the naturalist school and is known for portraying characters whose value lies not in their moral code, but in their persistence against all obstacles, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. ^[1]

Contents 1 Early life 2 Literary career 3 Political commitment 4 Legacy 5 Selected bibliography 5.1 Fiction 5.2 Nonfiction 6 Published as 7 References 8 External links

Early life

Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Sarah and John Paul Dreiser, a strict Catholic . John Paul Dresser was a German immigrant and Sarah was from the Mennonite farming community near Dayton, Ohio; she was disowned for marrying John and converting to Roman Catholicism. Theodore was the twelfth of thirteen children (the ninth of the ten surviving). The popular songwriter Paul Dresser (1859–1906) was his older brother.

From 1889 – 1890, Theodore attended Indiana University before flunking out^{[citation needed]}. Within several years, he was writing for the Chicago Globe newspaper and then the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He wrote several articles on writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Israel Zangwill and John Burroughs, and interviewed public figures like Andrew Carnegie, Marshall Field, Thomas Edison and Theodore Thomas^[2]. Other interviewees included Lillian Nordica, Emilia E. Barr, Philip Armour and Alfred Stieglitz^[3]. After proposing in 1893, he married Sara White on December 28, 1898. They ultimately separated in 1909, partly as a result of Dreiser's infatuation with Thelma Cudlipp, the teenage daughter of a work colleague, but were never formally divorced.^[4]

Literary career

His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), tells the story of a woman who flees her country life for the city (Chicago) and falls into a wayward life. It sold poorly, but it later acquired a considerable reputation. (It was made into a 1952 film by William Wyler, which starred Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones.)

He was a witness to a lynching in 1893, and wrote the short story "Nigger Jeff", which appeared in Ainslee's Magazine, in 1901.^[5]

His second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was published in 1911. 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. In 1892, when Dreiser began work as a newspaperman he "began to observe a certain type of crime in the United States that proved very common. It seemed to spring from the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown ambition to be somebody financially and socially." "Fortune hunting became a disease" with the frequent result of a peculiarly American kind of crime "many forms of murder for money...the young ambitious lover of some poorer girl...(for) a more attractive girl with money or position...it was not always possible to drop the first girl. What usually stood in the way was pregnancy."^[6] Dreiser claimed to have collected such stories every year between 1895 and 1935. The murder in 1911 of Avis Linnell by Clarence Richeson particularly caught his attention. By 1919 this murder was the basis of one of two separate novels begun by Dreiser. The 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette eventually became the basis for An American Tragedy.^[7]

Though primarily known as a novelist, Dreiser published his first collection of short stories, Free and Other Stories in 1918. The collection contained 11 stories. A particularly interesting story, "My Brother Paul", was a brief biography of his older brother, Paul Dresser, who was a famous songwriter in the 1890's. This story was the basis for the 1942 romantic movie, "My Gal Sal".

Other works include The "Genius" and Trilogy of Desire (a three-parter based on the remarkable life of the Chicago streetcar tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes and composed of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic). The latter was published posthumously in 1947.

Because of his depiction of then unaccepted aspects of life, such as sexual promiscuity in The "Genius", Dreiser was often forced to battle against censorship.

Political commitment

Politically, Dreiser was involved in several campaigns against social injustice. This included the lynching of Frank Little, one of the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the deportation of Emma Goldman, and the conviction of the trade union leader Tom Mooney. In November 1931 Dreiser led the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners to the coalfields of southeastern Kentucky, where they took testimony from coal miners in Pineville and Harlan on the violence against the miners and their unions by the coal operators.^[8]

Dreiser was a committed socialist, and wrote several non-fiction books on political issues. These included Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), the result of his 1927 trip to the Soviet Union, and two books presenting a critical perspective on capitalist America, Tragic America (1931) and America Is Worth Saving (1941). His vision of capitalism and a future world order with a strong American military dictate combined with the harsh criticism of the latter made him unpopular within the official circles. Although less politically radical friends, such as H.L. Mencken, spoke of Dreiser's relationship with communism as an "unimportant detail in his life," Dreiser's biographer Jerome Loving notes that his political activities since the early 1930s had "clearly been in concert with ostensible communist aims with regard to the working class." ^[9].

The author died on December 28, 1945 in Hollywood, aged 74.

Legacy

Dreiser had an enormous influence on the generation that followed his. In his tribute "Dreiser" from Horses and Men (1923), Sherwood Anderson writes:

Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick some of his books to pieces, to laugh at him for so much of his heavy prose ... [T]he 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.

Alfred Kazin characterized Dreiser as "stronger than all the others of his time, and at the same time more poignant; greater than the world he has described, but as significant as the people in it," while Larzer Ziff (UC Berkeley) remarked that Dreiser "succeeded beyond any of his predecessors or successors in producing a great American business novel." Arguably, Dreiser succeeded beyond any of his predecessors or successors in producing the great American novel.

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."^[10] A British view of Dreiser came from the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis: "Theodore Dreiser's books are enough to stop me in my tracks, never mind his letters — that slovenly turgid style describing endless business deals, with a seduction every hundred pages as light relief. If he's the great American novelist, give me the Marx Brothers every time."^[11]

One of Dreiser's strongest champions during his lifetime, H.L. Mencken, declared "that he is a great artist, and that no other American of his generation left so wide and handsome a mark upon the national letters. American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin. He was a man of large originality, of profound feeling, and of unshakable courage. All of us who write are better off because he lived, worked, and hoped."^[12]

Dreiser's great theme, the tremendous tensions that can arise among ambition, desire, and social mores, seems even more relevant today than in his own time, and in particular his "Trilogy of Desire" resonates powerfully. Dreiser is very much an author for the twenty-first century, which can be said of only a tiny handful of the other novelists of his day.

Selected bibliography

Fiction

• Sister Carrie (1900)
• "Old Rogaum and His Theresa" (1901)
• Jennie Gerhardt (1911)
• The Financier (1912)
• The Titan (1914)
• The Lost Phoebe (1914)
• The "Genius" (1915)
• Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916)
• Free and Other Stories (1918)
• The Hand of the Potter (1918)
• Twelve Men (1919)
• An American Tragedy (1925)
• Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories (1927)
• A Gallery of Women (1929)
• The Bulwark (1946)
• The Stoic (1947)

Nonfiction

• A Traveler at Forty (1913)
• A Hoosier Holiday (1916)
• Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life (1920)
• A Book About Myself (1922); republished (unexpurgated) as Newspaper Days (1931)
• The Color of a Great City (1923)
• Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928)
• My City (1929)
• Tragic America (1931)
• Dawn (1931)
• America Is Worth Saving (1941)

Published as

• Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men (Richard Lehan, ed.) (Library of America, 1987) ISBN 978-0-94045041-7.
• An American Tragedy (Thomas P. Riggio, ed.) (Library of America, 2003) ISBN 978-1-93108231-0.

References

1. ^ Van Doren, Carl (1925). American and British Literature since 1890. Century Company. 
2. ^ Yoshinobu Hakutani, 'Preface', in Theodore Dreiser, Selected Magazine Articles: v.1: Life and Art in the American 1890's: Vol 1, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,U.S., 1985, p. 10
3. ^ Donald Pizer Pizer, Theodore Dreiser: Interviews, University of Illinois Press, 2005, p. xiii [1]
4. ^ Newlin, Keith (2003). A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 78. ISBN 0-313-31680-5. http://books.google.ie/books?id=Qqsc3zwrDtIC&dq=A+Theodore+Dreiser+Encyclopedia&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=uyN3fMo3N1&sig=mfaK_1oT1_AltaqhQNplD6SNYBo&hl=en&ei=d2NvStv7PKLUjAf0k92eBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1. 
5. ^ Anne P. Rice (2003). Witnessing lynching: American writers respond. Rutgers University Press. p. 151-170. ISBN 9780813533308. http://books.google.com/books?id=xfSdgkSjsHUC&pg=PA151&lpg=PA151&dq=Writers'+League+Against+Lynching&source=bl&ots=Up4RE_DXI0&sig=wPGsAi4T9P-qidxxZWYHD1gsngM&hl=en&ei=4nAxSvu8KJDMMarYudsH&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10#PPA151,M1. 
6. ^ [2]
7. ^ Fishkin, Shelley Fisher (1988). From Fact to Fiction. Oxford University Press. 
8. ^ Theodore Dreiser et al., Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1932; rpt. Da Capo Press, 1970).
9. ^ Jerome Loving, The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. ISBN 0520234812, ISBN 9780520234819. P. 398.
10. ^ Rodden, John (2005). Irving Howe and the Critics: Celebrations and Attacks. Nebraska U.P.. 
11. ^ Hart-Davis (ed). Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, Vol 4 (1959 letters), John Murray, London, 1982. ISBN 0719539411, Letter dated 30 August 1959
12. ^ Riggio, Thomas P., "Biography of Theodore Dreiser," http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/dreiser/tdbio.html, Accessed March 22, 2008

• Cassuto, Leonard and Clare Virginia Eby, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Loving, Jerome. The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Theodore Dreiser

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Theodore Dreiser

• The International Theodore Dreiser Society
• Review-Essay: Dreiser on the Web
• DreiserWebSource at University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Sister Carrie from American Studies at the University of Virginia.
• Works by Theodore Dreiser at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Theodore Dreiser in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• See eclectica.htm for an English viewpoint of Dreiser and comparisons between the book and the film.
• Dreiser's personal library cataloged on LibraryThing
• Cyber USSR

v • d • e Works by Theodore Dreiser Novels: Sister Carrie · Jennie Gerhardt · The Financier · The Titan · The Genius · An American Tragedy · The Bulwark · The Stoic Short Story collections: Free and Other Stories · Twelve Men · Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories · A Gallery of Women Plays: Plays of the Natural and Supernatural · The Hand of the Potter Collection of poems: Moods Autobiography: A Traveller at Forty · A Hoosier Holiday · A Book About Myself (Newspaper Days) · Dawn Collection of essays: Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life · The Color of a Great City · Dreiser Looks at Russia · Tragic America · America Is Worth Saving · Notes on Life

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