Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser: The Novelist Who Refused to Judge

He had booked his passage home from his first European trip aboard the *Titanic*. An English publisher talked him onto a cheaper ship. The man who spent his life writing about how blind luck, appetite and money dispose of human beings was himself spared by a bargain fare — a coincidence so crude that no novelist would dare invent it, except the one it happened to.

Terre Haute and the Arithmetic of Poverty

Theodore Dreiser was born on 27 August 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana, the twelfth of thirteen children of John Paul Dreiser, a German immigrant from Mayen in the Rhine Province of Prussia, and Sarah Maria Schanab, who came out of a Mennonite farming community near Dayton, Ohio. The household was severely poor and the father could be harsh, a devout Catholic whose piety his son grew up to hate. Dreiser remained an atheist all his life.

The family's one glamorous figure was his elder brother Paul, who changed his name to Paul Dresser and became one of the most popular songwriters in America. The gap between the two brothers — one selling sentimental ballads to the nation, the other insisting on writing down what actually happened to poor girls in cities — is the essential Dreiser tension in miniature.

He finished high school in Warsaw, Indiana, and spent a single year at Indiana University Bloomington in 1889–90 before leaving without a degree. His real education began in 1892, in newsrooms.

The Newsroom Education

He worked as a reporter and drama critic in Chicago, St. Louis, Toledo, Pittsburgh and New York. Newspaper work gave him what university would not have: an evidentiary habit, a taste for the case file, and a great deal of information about how American cities actually processed people. His first piece of fiction, "The Return of Genius," appeared in the *Chicago Daily Globe* under the pseudonym Carl Dreiser. In 1895 he took the editorship of *Ev'ry Month*, where he published his first story, "Forgotten." He married the schoolteacher Sara Osborne White on 28 December 1898, five years after their engagement.

Sister Carrie

He began *Sister Carrie* in 1899 at the House of Four Pillars in Maumee, Ohio, and published it in 1900. It follows a country girl who pursues fame and money through her relationships with men, and — this is the scandal — is not punished for it. She rises. Her married lover falls. The book declines to supply the moral accounting that every American reader of 1900 expected as a matter of course.

The result was a printing deliberately kept small because of the subject matter, and a book that effectively disappeared. Dreiser suffered a breakdown and did not publish another novel for eleven years. It has since been called the greatest of all American urban novels. He recovered by returning to magazines, becoming editor of *The Delineator* in June 1907 and, for the first time in his life, financially secure. *Jennie Gerhardt* followed in 1911.

The Financier's Eye

Then he did something no American novelist had attempted: he wrote the tycoon from the inside, without indignation. The Trilogy of Desire — *The Financier* (1912), *The Titan* (1914) and *The Stoic*, published posthumously in 1947 — is modelled on Charles Tyson Yerkes, the Chicago streetcar magnate, and treats capitalist predation as a natural force to be described rather than a sin to be denounced. *The "Genius"* of 1915 brought the censors down on him again and faced banning; Dreiser fought that fight, and others like it, for decades.

Meanwhile his private life ran on the same principles as his fiction. He separated from Sara in 1909 over his infatuation with Thelma Cudlipp, the teenage daughter of a colleague, but never divorced her; she died in 1942. There were long entanglements with the actress and painter Kyra Markham and with his secretary Clara Jaeger. The constant was Helen Patges Richardson, a cousin, whose affair with him began in 1919 and who finally became his wife on 13 June 1944.

An American Tragedy

Between 1895 and 1935 Dreiser collected newspaper accounts of a particular kind of crime, convinced that "murder for money" was a distinctively American act growing out of what he called ingrown ambition. In 1925 he built the definitive one. *An American Tragedy* takes the 1906 killing of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in upstate New York and turns it into eight hundred pages of relentless causation: a boy of no advantages, a factory girl, a richer girl, a rowboat. It was his first genuine commercial success, and it remains the book on which his reputation rests.

Why Theodore Is Called a Genius

The quality is not verbal. Almost nobody, including his defenders, claims he wrote good sentences. What he possessed was something rarer and harder to counterfeit: the ability to see American life without the moral apparatus that everyone around him took for reality, and the sheer stamina to write it down at full length. He removed judgement from the American novel and replaced it with causation. Carrie's rise and Hurstwood's fall are not rewards and punishments; they are outcomes.

H. L. Mencken, his great champion, wrote that "American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin," adding: "All of us who write are better off because he lived, worked, and hoped." Irving Howe placed him "among the American giants, the very few American giants we have had."

The counter-case was made loudly in his lifetime. He was passed over for the 1930 Nobel in favour of Sinclair Lewis. The publisher Rupert Hart-Davis dismissed his "slovenly turgid style," and F. R. Leavis questioned his command of English; a serious tradition holds that force at book length does not compensate for failure at sentence level. Nor is the moral record clean: he praised Stalin's Soviet Union during the Great Terror, supported the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact, and joined the Communist Party in August 1945. The honest verdict is that his genius was architectural rather than artistic: he built a machine for showing Americans what they were, and its ugliness close up is part of why it works.

The Late Years

His politics were not merely opinions. He defended the IWW organiser Frank Little, Sacco and Vanzetti, Emma Goldman and Tom Mooney, and in November 1931 led the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners into the Kentucky coalfields to investigate the violence against miners in the Harlan County war. He travelled to the Soviet Union in 1927 and produced *Dreiser Looks at Russia* (1928), followed by *Tragic America* (1931) and *America Is Worth Saving* (1941).

The novels were only part of the output. As the Library of America notes, there are only six novels among the two dozen books he published in his lifetime; the rest is journalism, short stories, poetry, plays, travel writing, memoir and polemic. His biographer Richard Lingeman singles out *Twelve Men* (1919) as one of his most enduring books, a gallery of lives in which, as the collection insists, "goodness comes in unconventional guises."

He died in Hollywood on 28 December 1945, aged seventy-four — the forty-seventh anniversary, to the day, of his first wedding. *The Bulwark* and *The Stoic* appeared after his death. Indiana State University named Dreiser Hall for him in 1966, Stony Brook named a college after him, and the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame inducted him in 2011.

Achievements

• Worked as writer, journalist and novelist