Theodore Dreiser Books

Dreiser follows such a simple structure. First, the dreamy, hypnotic recurrent images of early childhood, that only melted into perspective years later. Second, the glory of sexual awakening, mixed with the whitewater current of ambition, shuffling like white noise into his consciousness only once he tunes his ears to listen.
To the details. Dreiser loved his mother, in a way that may have swung past the platonic, and certainly shaped his female ideal. She does seem an ideal parent, with her selfless love, endless devotion in hard work, and support regardless of the wayward tendencies of her iconoclastic brood. His father seems little more than a hollowed out Jesus enthusiast, who, following the personal disaster that surely damaged his brain, emptily follows Christ's lead by punishing his children for not being religious enough.
Dreiser himself came of age by losing it to the immigrant bakery owner's daughter, an idle miscreant long forgotten outside these pages. Dreiser was bound by two diametrically opposed desires - one for sex, the other for love, and as a wise man once said, these rarely overlap, especially for Dreiser in his early youth. His platonic ideal is the shy, frumpy type, while he can't help but be lured in by the pretty ones. His sex complex keeps him from many a lay, which he overcomes by ravishing a young Italian waywardess.
Poe once said something like "Any man who chooses to tell about his life the way it really is will change the world forever, but no one has the courage to do it." Dreiser comes close, though I doubt this has stood much ground the test of time. I was referred to it by one of Fitzgerald's early characters. Dreiser doesn't hesitate to wag his finger at himself, and never, ever makes me wish not to have had the golden opportunity to join him for lunch of a foggy Tuesday.

"Dawn" may be stronger than Dreiser's fiction, which is saying a good deal. He shows a remarkable memory and attention to detail. I am admittedly biased because I identified so closely with his experiences as a child, youth, and adult, but the scenes in this volume are well drawn and he overcomes his sometimes florid style and difficulties with fluid language well here. Along with "Newspaper Days," one gets an intimate look at the life of this talented and important author.

Although he published this volume (second after Newspaper Days, chronologically), Dreiser intended Dawn to be the first of four autobiographies, each covering approximately 20 years of his life. This confirms Dreiser's ambition, but doesn't place this book in the prize category of great autobiographical works. For all of his professed candor, Dreiser still skirts personal truths for the protocol, and his sentences wind and ramble and repeat like an electric train on contorted tracks.
If you liked Sister Carrie and some of his other longer fictions, this extra reading may be helpful, but if you want to go for the "red meat" of Dreiser's life, I'd encourage a reading of his American Notebooks--his journals, published after his death and never really intended for publication. In them, boy oh boy, does the real Dreiser sans facade emerge.

Dreiser is considered a major American novelist, and like many writers, he spent a good portion of his career working for newspapers and magazines. The thirty-eight sketches here originally appeared in various New York newspapers and Dreiser's own magazine, The Bohemian. Around 3-10 pages each, they are vivid portraits of New York City between 1900-15, but not of the high life. Rather, the pieces "are the very antithesis.. of all that glitter and glister that made the social life of that day so superior. Its shadow, if you will, its reverse face." This was a time when, as he writes in his foreword, "...the city, as I see it, was more varied and arresting and, after its fashion, poetic and even idealistic then than it is now" and there were "greater social and financial contrasts."

The pieces can be roughly divided into those about people, those about places, and a few more abstract pieces about the mood of a place or time. All are drawn from his years of wandering the streets with an observant and curious eye, and those about people tend to be the strongest and of most interest to the contemporary reader. As Dreiser wrote, "I was never weary of spying out how the other fellow lived and how he made his way." Anyone interested in the social history of New York will find such pieces as "Bums", "The Toilers of the Tenements", "The Track Walker", "The Pushcart Man", "The Bread-Line", "Our Red Slayer" (about a butcher in an abattoir), "The Man on the Bench", "The Men in the Dark", "The Men in the Storm", "The Sandwich Men" and others well worth reading. his writing on place tends to be very good too, especially in "The Waterfront", "The Car Yard", "A Vanished Seaside Resort", "A Wayplace of the Fallen", "The Bowery Mission", and "Christmas in the Tenements." Less interesting are his more clunky poetical musings, such as "The Flight of Pigeons", "On Being Poor", "The Realization of an Ideal", "The Beauty of Life" and "The Freshness of the Universe." The prose throughout is a little clunky and old-fashioned, but the subject matter is what's important, and as Dreiser writes "they bear, I think, the stamp of their hour."

this book is great. dreiser tells the life of twelve men, whom all he knew except for one or two people. this book will keep u hooked

Sister Carrie was published half a century after Flaubert's Madame Bovary, but the stories are similar in many ways. Both are about women who want more from life than their initial allotment, and both fall into societally-unapproved liaisons in their attempt to get more. There are two major differences between the books: First, although Emma Bovary's first affair is initiated by her lover, Emma thereafter becomes the pursuer of increasingly reluctant lovers. By contrast, Carrie seems to "fall into" her relationships merely by her inability to say no to men who are (and continue to be) entranced by her. Second, the author punishes Emma for her licentiousness by giving her a hideous, painful death, whereas Carrie's only punishment is to experience loneliness at the top as she rises in fame and fortune. Which ending do you find more believable? I haven't decided yet.

The narrator who reads this book uses very little inflection and has an irritating voice to boot. Being an auditory learner, I prefer to listen to books over reading the words; this reader makes it almost painful. Since the material itself is far from scintillating, the reader could make up the difference with a good reading with lots of inflection and characterization, but she doesn't. Blah!

I was forced to read this book for a combination honors English, History class. We were studying the Guilded Age and the teachers felt this novel would help to portray exactly what people went through. Needless to say I was very bored. The descriptions are so intense and Dreiser's style of writing was not enough to keep me awake. There were certain aspects that I enjoyed, however the majority of this novel was comprised of verbose sections. This book did not really meet my expectations and I was not very satisfied. However, I was told that you might need to read it 5 times before all of the meaning would come through. I wouldn't give it the time.

i felt the story was long and borin

This edition, which was prepared by volunteers, contains numerous errors, dropped words and punctuations, misspellings, wrong tenses, etc. It was so annoying to read that I purchased the Modern Library edition ($3.50) after about 75 pages. The errors are not occasional; they're on virtually every page. Although it's much less expensive, the savings aren't worth it.