Theodore Dreiser

Who Was Theodore Dreiser?

Theodore Dreiser was the most uncompromising of the American naturalists — the novelist who brought to American fiction a deterministic vision so bleak and so honest that publishers refused his first novel for years and readers found him scandalous long after his contemporaries had been absorbed into the mainstream. Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871, the twelfth of thirteen children of a devout German Catholic father whose business failures condemned the family to poverty, he grew up in conditions that gave him a direct knowledge of the economic forces that his fiction would explore.

His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), was published by Doubleday only after Frank Norris championed it, and even then the publisher’s wife found it so morally objectionable that the firm essentially suppressed it. The novel’s story — a young woman who rises socially by accepting the support of men she is not married to, and whose rise is not punished by the narrative — violated the conventions of the moral novel so completely that it took a decade to find its audience.

Dreiser is significant for TLA because his fiction documents, with unusual honesty and unusual pessimism, what human life looks like when it is understood entirely in terms of biological drives, economic forces, and social pressures. His characters are not free; they are moved. And yet they long for something more than what moves them, and this longing — unaccounted for within his deterministic framework — is the residue of the image of God that his naturalism cannot entirely suppress.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Sister Carrie — 1900
• Jennie Gerhardt — 1911
• The Financier — 1912 — Trilogy of Desire I
• The Titan — 1914 — Trilogy of Desire II
• An American Tragedy — 1925
• The Stoic — 1947 — Trilogy of Desire III, posthumous