Word: dreiser
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...conducted multiple affairs with college girls, actresses, housewives and heiresses. Always in search of new mistress-mothers, he devoured them all like an insatiable infant. He charmed them, lied to them and used them-as bedmates, social secretaries, editors, nurses and servants. The women seemed to like it, and Dreiser usually walked out on them before they got bored...
More than a search for mother, Dreiser's turbulent life was a search for meaning. Incapable of orderly, objective thought, he lumbered from howling superstition to scientific determinism, finally came to believe in an "intelligent creative force," which he sometimes called God. At the end of his life, he revised his old, unfinished novel, The Bulwark, to develop its religious significance and ramifications...
...Dreiser's importance to the American novel lay in what seemed to be his "social realism." He imagined himself an American Zola, and set out to describe the ordinary lives of ordinary people in ordinary language. He stamped all over the parlor niceties of Victorian tradition and proclaimed in a booming voice that heroines are not often virgins heroes are not usually gentlemen. He did not necessarily punish the wicked. Indeed, in Dreiser's novels good and evil do not exist-there is only unheroic suffering and scrambling for success. In retrospect, his prose seems clotted, clumsy, pompous...
When he died in 1945, he was almost forgotten. His funeral was an American travesty, attended by all the preposterous contradictions of his unlikely life. Services were held in a Congregational church; a Communist delivered the eulogy; and Dreiser was interred with capitalistic splendor at Forest Lawn, in the plot next...
...film version, retitled, of Dreiser's An American Tragedy...