Word: dreiser
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...THEODORE DREISER: APOSTLE OF NATURE (354 pp.)-Robert H. Ellas-Knopf...
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...
Strictly as an account of Dreiser's bitter 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...
...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...
University Theater (Sun. 2:30 p.m., NBC). Dramatization of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy...