Word: dreiser
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Wild Side. Back in the 1870s, the destitute Dreiser family was the talk of Terre Haute. Father John Paul was a religious fanatic who rarely worked. Mother Sarah was a warm-blooded mystical pagan who rarely worried. There were ten Dreiser children, most of them on the wild side, one of them, Paul Dresser, destined for fame as a songwriter. Lonely, nervous Theodore clung to his mother's skirts and suckled himself on fantasies of success. Restless to realize them, he dropped out of high school after one year, worked sporadically, somehow got into Indiana State University-again dropped...
Carrie turned out to be the sudsy story of a fallen woman who rises to eventual eminence in the theater. The critics cut it to ribbons: "immoral," "dreary," "a philosophy of despair." The book sold 456 copies. Dreiser collapsed into paranoid delusions and contemplated suicide. For seven years he floundered through a series of odd jobs...
...Carrie was republished and acclaimed "a work of genius." Iconoclast Dreiser lapsed into respectability. He took over as top editor of Butterick's magazines (feminine fashions), snagged H. L. Mencken as a contributor, wrote perfervidly moral editorials -and lost his job when he tried to seduce the daughter of an assistant editor...
Destroyed by Success. In the next five years he toured Europe, juggled his love affairs, experimented with narcotics, pamphleteered against puritanism, fought with his publishers, lived off advances-and agonizingly, determinedly labored to produce Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, and his autobiographical The "Genius." By 1916, Dreiser was the hero of the avant-garde and the pet peeve of the Nice Nellies, who denounced The "Genius" as literary sewage and got it banned by the censor. Crushed, Dreiser fell silent for ten years...
...everybody's hero. The story of a naive young man in a hurry who murders his pregnant mistress so he can marry the boss's daughter, it was acclaimed by Joseph Wood Krutch as "the greatest American novel of our generation." Within a year it made Dreiser $40,000 in royalties and $80,000 in film rights...