Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,690

This is the grave of Theodore Dreiser.

Born in 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana, Dreiser grew up in a big Catholic family and they were quite poor. He did graduate from high school and went to Indiana University for a year, but dropped out and decided to take a shot in the newspaper business. He moved around a whole bunch over the next few years working on various newspapers.

But let’s not beat around the bush, we all know that we are talking about Dreiser today because of his groundbreaking fiction. He started writing a few short stories, writing drama criticism, and becoming known for profiles of America’s famous writers of the past and present. He also got to interview lots of famous people and that got his name known too. He wrote for many of the big magazines of that great magazine age.

In 1900, Dreiser published his first novel. Sister Carrie was a huge sensation and quite controversial. Dreiser took the Horatio Alger formula and adapted it for the real world. One of the key novels of the American realist movement, it followed a young woman leaving the family farm to move to Chicago. She starts in a shoe factory but like an Alger hero, she meets a rich man. But unlike an Alger hero (well actually like the subtext to the work by that noted pedophile), she sleeps with him and becomes his mistress. Talking about that was a big no-no in 1900! She sleeps her away up the food chain and then becomes a famous actress. She ends the story as famous but lonely, but hardly the kind of downfall this sort of story usually would have pushed. Rather, this was one of the first serious novels about urban life in American history.

The other truly classic Dresier novel came much later. That was An American Tragedy, published in 1925. Dreiser had always been interested in crime and the middling sort of American who wanted to be somebody and would do anything to make that happen, including murder if need be. So in An American Tragedy, based on an actual case from 1906, a young man from a middling background but who wants to rise and basically be a character from a Sinclair Lewis novel ends up being a character in a Theodore Dreiser novel because he gets a girl pregnant and then murders her. This turns out to not be his first murder, he gets arrested, tried, and executed (sorry, spoiler alert!). It’s a very long novel and it’s been a long time since I read it, but I would say it is pretty close to great. It was hugely influential at the time. Sergei Eisenstein and Erich Von Stroheim both considered turning it into a feature film. Josef Von Sternburg did make a version in 1931, but Dreiser hated it.

Now, that’s all I’ve read by Dreiser. Not that many people really read him anymore I don’t think. Maybe some college classes still assign Sister Carrie because it is a short, not that students take American lit classes much anymore. But he’s really an interesting guy. He was a key liberal of the early twentieth century. He worked with the IWW and fought constantly against censors. His up front discussions of sexuality constantly got him in trouble, though the sex is so lightly described that it’s hard to imagine today, but this is pre-D.H. Lawrence. He fought against the deportation of Emma Goldman and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. He even went to eastern Kentucky during the Harlan County War to take testimony from miners who survived the murders of them by coal company thugs.

In fact, by the late 20s, political work took up more of Dreiser’s time than fiction did. He traveled to the Soviet Union and published Dreiser Looks at Russia in 1928. He also wrote anti-capitalist books about the problems of the United States, including Tragic America in 1931 and America Is Worth Saving in 1941. I actually am kind of interested in reading these, not because I think they would be good per se, because I am sure they are not, but because they would be an interesting look at the issue from a very good writer. And if you were wondering, by this time, Dreiser was a full on communist. He didn’t join the Communist Party until 1945, but had effectively been a communist going back to the late 20s. Interestingly though, he didn’t seem to allow the communism to affect his personal life much. He had lots of friends who hated communism, including H.L. Mencken, who largely dismissed the politics as not really that important in understanding his buddy. He also was a massive womanizer for his whole life, having many many affairs, though was in a long-term relationship with a woman named Helen Patges Richardson who tolerated that and may well have had more than her own share. Also, they were cousins.

Oh, and Dreiser was almost on the Titanic. The only reason he wasn’t is that his publisher suggested a cheaper ship to him to return from Europe. The Nazis burned his books in Germany, but that sort of made sense because the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which had been Anthony Comstock’s organization back in the day, also tried to ban his books. I’m sure Chris Rufo is on the hunt to eliminate the scary, evil Dreiser from contemporary libraries. After all, we know how much the kids love early 20th century naturalism!

Of course all of this is interesting, but Dreiser’s real influence was on American literature and in this, he had a huge influence on future writers. Sherwood Anderson praised him as the man who finally separated American literature from the Puritan past and repressive present. This was despite that fact that few considered Dreiser a real master of the language and that’s the thing about reading him today–it is a bit of a slog.

Dreiser died just after he joined the Communist Party, in 1945. He was 74 years old. A few years later, Mencken wrote a long remembrance of his buddy in The New Yorker, which you can read if you have a subscription today, and I assume most of you do because if you aren’t subscribing to some good magazines, you are not supporting alternatives to the bullshit journalism we complain about on this site every day.

Theodore Dreiser is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

If you would like this series to visit more titans of American literature, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. The first volume of Dreiser in the Library of America series is Volume 36, which seems about right. I’ve visited most of the next people in the series–William James, Flannery O’Connor, Eugene O’Neill, Henry James, Abraham Lincoln, William Faulkner, Ulysses S. Grant, Washington Irving, Francis Parkman, James Fenimore Cooper, and Frederick Douglass. Willa Cather is in France, so that one seems less likely. William Tecumseh Sherman, whose memoirs are Volume 51, is in St. Louis. Sarah Orne Jewett, who has Volume 69, is in South Berwick, Maine. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.