“A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Literary Works of one of our greatest American writers and novelists, Theodore Dreiser”

“A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Literary Works of one of our greatest American writers and novelists, Theodore Dreiser”

My dear fellow thinkers and readers and lovers of American and English literature, I bid you and ask you to join with me in another voyage of intellectual discovery and critical thinking.

Today I have the privilege and honor of speaking of and presenting the life and works of one of the greatest of our American writers and one of our greatest novelists, Theodore Dreiser. He is the author of many of our literary treasures, works which once begun cannot be put down and all once read through, engage our minds, souls and spirits as few novels and works can and do.

I am a great fan of English and American literature. When I read these authors, poets and novelists such as Keats, Byron, Shelley and A.E. Housman for poets and Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, Austen and Conrad as novelists, I am raised to a different level. I acquire in reading and knowing these authors a different level of understanding. In coming to know them I am lifted up intellectually, emotionally and spiritually and I will never regret the time spent in reading them and being exposed to them and absorbing their greatness, despite our American society telling us all constantly that the time spent with them has no practical value as producing no income. A life without this great literature is a life cheated and wasted of what these greatest minds have to offer.

Dreiser was born in 1871 and died in 1945. He was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels are studies, in a sense, of nature and his best-known novels are Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt and what many see as his greatest work, An American Tragedy. 

Dreiser was born in Indiana. He graduated from high school in Indiana and attended Indiana University for a year from 1890 to 1891. After a few years he began working for the Chicago Globe newspaper and then the St. Louis Globe Democrat. Sister Carrie, published in 1900, portrayed a changing society in which a young woman flees rural life for the city, Chicago, fails to find work that pays a living wage, falls prey to several men, and ultimately achieves fame as an actress.

His second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was published in 1911 and features a young woman who moved from rural villages to the cities. It portrays the social changes in connection with urbanization. An American Tragedy was published in 1925. This novel was based on a 1906 murder in upstate New York. Dreiser also wrote short stories and his first collection was published in 1918. He also wrote poetry. His other works include The Financier, 1912, and The Titan and The Stoic, which were published after his death in 1947.

Dreiser was involved in defending union radicals and was a socialist. He wrote several nonfiction books on political issues. He wrote the book, Dreiser Looks at Russia, in 1928 as a result of his 1927 trip to the USSR. Rand wrote two books critical of the American capitalist system. He joined the US communist party in 1945. He married in 1893 and married again in 1944. Dreiser influenced many. He is spoken of by Sherwood Anderson, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, F.R. Leavis, and H.L. Mencken.

I have read a number of Dreiser's Books, including Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. I derived immense enjoyment from them all and mean someday to read all his novels, in particular his very greatest, An American Tragedy. The issue he considered in his novels, the harshness of our capitalist system, is still with us through his books, as is his commitment to socialism. These are living concerns and issues and his writings and person demand our attention on these matters. He lived in a time when people took their ideas and thinking seriously, unlike the present age which is solely focused on money, a shallow idea that brings the thinker nowhere. He was a socialist and communist because that is what he believed, as opposed to the present age where ideas and thoughts and principles are little thought of and certainly not applied or followed. I mourn the surface shallowness of the present age.