Word: authors
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When a friend read Theodore Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie, he asked him where he could have picked up so much knowledge about life. Said 39-year-old Author Dreiser: "Genius, I suppose." As Robert Elias' biography shows, it was a lot more complicated, and more painful, than that...
...early years, this is one of the best biographies of an American literary figure since Israfel, Hervey Allen's life of Poe. Its report of Dreiser's last years is perfunctory and its criticism of his work is so noncommittal that the reader has trouble in fathoming Author Elias' own opinion. But Dreiser's youth in the gaslit underworld of Terre Haute, his work in the rowdy newspaper and music publishing houses of the turn of the century, and above all, the gaudy entrances & exits of his extraordinary sisters, make it a kind of nonfiction...
...author of An American Tragedy was like one of those characters in an old-fashioned farce who is always being mistaken for someone else: he is overwhelmed with embraces by the landlady when he merely wants to rent a room, or he is treated like a lawbreaker when he simply wants a job. Dreiser stuttered for a while before he was seven years old. He had a cast in one eye. He was bullied by older boys and overawed by his brother Paul, a successful songwriter (My Gal Sal), with his fur coat, silk hat and smart cane...
...Author Elias, like most of Dreiser's critics, makes much of his determination to gain wealth in order to achieve a respectable life. But this record makes it clear that by respectability Dreiser meant simply a freedom from cruel underworld jokes, or the appalling misrepresentation of his simplest actions. When he wrote of poverty he was not writing of ordinary working-class life, but of something highly specialized existing within it, with its own codes and manners, disciplines, hardships and horrors...
There were always in the background of his life his sisters, as there was always in the back of his mind his bitter youth to direct his imagination. So influential do the sisters seem to have been that one of the greatest weaknesses of Author Elias' biography is that he does not tell considerably more about them. The best of Dreiser's writing, Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, surely reflected their lives as much...