What's the differences between Thomas Hardy and Theodore Dreiser?

Answer 1

Answer

Apart from the fact that Hardy was English and Dreiser American, they are chalk and cheese. Hardy wrote of life in a fictitious English country town of wide-open spaces and brawny farmboys, country fairs, and wronged women. Dreiser was from what is known as the social naturalist school writing much later, in the 1920s, and his subject was the oppression of the working classes (especially women, which always surprised me, because he was an uncouth pig in life) and the horrors of working 12 hours a day bent over a sewing machine for 6 dollars a week. Much like children in Nike factories do, interestingly enough. Dreiser was particularly interested, as are all Marxists, like me, in how their working conditions affected the rest of their lives, and he was fascinated by (or appalled at) the discrepancy between the idle rich and the working poor; the steelmill owners and the men tossed onto the streets because you can't work in a steel mill when you've just had your hands burned off, can you? Workers' Comp was limited to...well, nobody at all, because there was none; nor was there a social security pension if you managed (or wanted) to live to 65. Nor did you get employer-paid health insurance, nor did you get President's Day off.

You know how someone is always yapping about "why doesn't someone write the great American novel"? Well, Dreiser did; it's called an American Tragedy, and you need to read both volumes to get anything out of it. Plus you should avoid at all costs the movie "A Place in the Sun" which is "based" on the novel. I say "based" because the movie has people in it, some of whom have names similar to the characters in the book.

Dreiser was not alone in his treatment of the poor and downtrodden and the efforts of the rich to keep them there while at the same time selling them cheap, shoddy goods with lavish advertising campaigns that were even more dubious than the "Get Fabulously Rich While You Sleep" ads today. Sinclair Lewis, Ring Lardner, HL Mencken, Steven Crane and others were all writing satires on the Realism of American life from the period 1890-1939 which, to quote someone else was nasty, brutish, and quite short. If you want to have your heart torn clean out of your chest cavity, read "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. It caused such a sensation that it was directly responsible for the legislation that lead to the FDA. But I warn you, truly, this book might give you nightmares for a long time to come.