Theodore Dreiser was born in August of 1871 at Terre Haute, Indiana, the twelfth of thirteen children. The parents of the protagonists in his novels Jennie Gerhardt and An American Tragedy are representations of his own: the father, a fanatical religionist, authoritarian, unimaginative, ineffectual; the mother, submissive, kind, distracted by domestic problems; the family as a whole impoverished and frequently moving, usually to cheaper lodgings. As a schoolboy, Dreiser was physically awkward and a social failure, but he did well in school and became a voracious reader of American and British fiction. He won his father’s rare approval when, as a teen-ager, he purchased sets of works by Irving, Dickens, and Scott.
The oldest boy, Johann Paul, became a successful songwriter and entertainer under the name Paul Dresser, but it was his sisters’ activities that seem to have made the strongest impression on Dreiser. Sylvia had an out-of-wedlock baby at age 20 by the son of a wealthy family in Warsaw, Indiana. Theresa hooked up with, and then was deserted by, a Chicago manufacturer. Emma took an architect for a lover and, when he left her, ran off with a married saloon clerk who bankrolled their flight with $3500 stolen from his employer.
Dreiser wrote two memoirs, Dawn and Newspaper Days, chronicling his youth and young manhood. It will suffice for me to say here that, after a sympathetic and devoted public school teacher supported him through one year at Indiana University, he knocked about a series of menial jobs, continued his self-education, made friends of Bohemian-types, and finally landed in the newspaper business, where reporting jobs at different Midwestern dailies saw him covering the crime beat, a lynching, labor strikes, machine politics—nothing that would have mitigated a view of life, imprinted by his own experience, inimical to the genteel tradition that reigned among a largely female novel-reading public.
Sister Carrie, his first novel, was published, on the recommendation of Frank Norris, by the firm of Doubleday, Page in 1900. The publisher, owing largely to the distaste with which it was read by Mrs Doubleday, cooled on the book after having accepted it and did nothing in the way of promotion. Mrs Doubleday’s objections were on moral grounds. Caroline Meeber, the title character, comes to Chicago, age 18, from a small town in Wisconsin. She meets on the train an affluent young salesman, the thirtyish Charles Drouet, with whom she takes up after finding that the work she is able to get in Chicago is dreary and exhausting, the pay insufficient to acquire things she desires. He sets her up in an apartment and enjoys her sexual favors while pursuing his career as a traveling salesman. Drouet has an older acquaintance, Hurstwood, the manager of an upscale saloon, who, trapped in a poor marriage, conceives an intense infatuation for Carrie, whose good looks are now augmented by stylish clothes purchased with Drouet's money. She however prefers Hurstwood, who is richer and more sophisticated, less of a bounder than Drouet, and eventually she runs off with him to New York after he steals a large sum from the safe in his office at the saloon. In New York, Hurstwood’s fortunes decline, until finally he has run through his money and the two are forced to live on Carrie’s small income as a Broadway chorus girl. Owing to luck abetted by her good looks, Carrie’s acting career lifts off and she separates from Hurstwood, who sinks into homelessness and, finally, suicide. The end.
In 1900 the subject matter, including preeminently the frank presentation of sexual relationships between unmarried adults, with the woman advancing materially instead of suffering retribution for her transgressions, was shocking. But Sister Carrie broke ground in other ways, too. The great cities of Chicago and New York are realistically depicted, the crowds of all types, the saloons and stores and theatres and neighborhoods of the easy rich and grasping poor, the way that people dressed and the houses they lived in and how married people sometimes treated each other behind the walls of those houses. It may be the first American work of fiction in which the necessity of earning a living looms large. Its length, together with the relentlessly accumulating details, gives the book a quality often indicated by the word “textured.” It was a commercial failure and the first masterpiece of American realism.
Dreiser, however, failed to develop as an artist. Discouraged by the virtual suppression of Sister Carrie, he spent the next decade making lots of money, mainly as an editor of women’s magazines whose subscribers had sensibilities like Mrs Doubleday’s, and it wasn’t until 1911 that his second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was published. It’s almost as good as Sister Carrie, and its virtues are similar. He was a writer for the rest of his life, but of the books yet to be written only An American Tragedy, an immense novel based on an actual murder case from 1906 in the Adirondacks, comes up to the level of his first two. An editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, describing this ambitious work published in 1925, speaks of its “thick texture of biographical circumstance, social fact, and industrial detail.” The strengths are still the same.
Of the remainder of Dreiser’s fictional output, the most interesting is the so-called “trilogy of desire,” a series of novels—The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (posthumously, in 1947)—treating the career of one Frank Cowperwood, who is based on the American businessman Charles Yerkes. Dreiser was interested in money and power, and these novels make explicit the connection, suggested in more successful works, between financial and sexual prosperity. He promulgated a law of life that subsumed areas traditionally explained by the finest feelings and the highest human aspirations.
Dreiser’s novels are to a considerable extent transcriptions of his own experiences, his longings, and those of his family: the similarity between the history of his sister Emma, who ran away with the married saloon clerk after he had stolen $3500, and the story of Sister Carrie and Hurstwood being just one instance of biography serving as source. An American Tragedy achieves the alchemy of arousing our sympathy for a stock villain by endowing that villain with goals, yearnings, impulses that are recognizably, undeniably human. The characterization is so persuasive because Dreiser comprehended it completely. Clyde Griffiths is not the murderer in the case the novel is based on so much as he is Dreiser himself, less the intelligence and dogged will. Clyde wanted the wrong things but they are the things almost everyone wants, especially perhaps if your background is one of deprivation. In a way, the novel is On Walden Pond brought up to date for the new urban America.
Dreiser married in 1898, and he wrote, in Newspaper Days, that by then he had known his wife, Sara, long enough so that “the first flare of love had thinned down to the pale flame of duty.” Duty! In 1907 Dreiser precipitated a scandal by pursuing a romance with an 18-year-old he met in a dance class. Mrs Dreiser was to endure a long succession of such indiscretions. It’s another way, perhaps, in which his biography informs his fiction. The poor awkward boy now cut a figure in the world and he found that, like the rich buccaneer Yerkes, he was attractive to women. He quit the magazine publishing job rather than give up on seducing the 18-year-old. American literature, if not Sara Dreiser, was the beneficiary.
Ever the restless searcher, Dreiser in his later years was attracted to radical politics and religious philosophy. I don’t think many people today think much of Dreiser Looks At Russia (1928) or of his opposition, on account of his hatred of the English, to making war on Hitler. On the other hand, his social activism was often distinguished by purity and bravery, as in his defense of the Scottsboro boys. He died in 1945.