Theodore Dreiser
1 book analyzed
Biography
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, the twelfth of thirteen children in a poor German Catholic family. His father was a failed mill owner; his mother was illiterate but fiercely supportive. Several of his sisters became 'fallen women' by Victorian standards -- one ran off with a married man, another became a kept woman in Chicago, another had an illegitimate child. Dreiser drew directly on his sister Emma's experience for the Hurstwood plot: in 1886, Emma Dreiser eloped with L.A. Hopkins, a married man who stole money from his employer's safe. They fled to Montreal and then New York. Dreiser worked as a journalist in Chicago, St. Louis, and New York before writing Sister Carrie in 1899-1900. He submitted it to Doubleday, Page & Company, where Frank Norris championed it. But Frank Doubleday's wife read the galleys, found the novel immoral, and pressured her husband to suppress it. Doubleday technically published the book -- printing 1,008 copies to fulfill the contract -- but refused to distribute or promote it. Dreiser received $68.40 in royalties and fell into a severe depression. The novel was not properly published until 1907 (B.W. Dodge edition) and did not achieve wide readership until the 1920s, when Dreiser was recognized as one of the founders of American literary naturalism.