Word: dreiser
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Theodore Dreiser died, scarcely five years age, at the age of seventy-five, he left behind him a long, uneven, and controversial career that included thousands of pages of literary make shift and two or three books which made up for all the rest. In this new study of Dreiser, which was finished by Professor F. O. Matthiessen just before his death last spring and is now published posthumously, the details of Dreiser's life have been subordinated to an analysis of his important work--and the result is a thoroughly satisfying critical essay, though it cannot be called...
...During Dreiser's life America progressed from post-Civil War attitudes of Individualism and stark economic competition to the social consciousness of the New Deal. At his death, he had barley finished a last novel trying to explain the needs of our own time; but his major contribution to American literature consists in his picture of an earlier...
Born in Indiana in 1871, Dreiser grew up at the time when Genteel Tradition was giving way to a rising new movement called "realism." In the early chapters of the book, Matthiessen traces Dreiser's groping for a new expression of that movement, which search culminated in 1900 in the publication of "Sister Carrie...
This book was banned throughout the country for its frank treatment of the environmental forces which Dreiser, as an unsuccessful and errant journalist, observed about him. But Matthiessen points out that the writer, if anything, "somewhat softened the actuality" of the forces which shape the lives of Carrie Meeber and Hurstwood. With the tragic account of the latter figure, he adds, Dreiser "began his chief contribution to American literature...
This contribution was not complete until twenty-five years later, with the appearance of Dreiser's finest work, "An American Tragedy." Matthiessen traces the writer's career during that time in terms of his literary output. From the sympathetic portrait of the heroine of "Jennie Gerhardt"--based in some measure on the author's mother--Dreiser moved to a lengthy and only partly successful study of the "Merchant Prince" financiers who dominated the country during his youth, and by whom he was both attracted and repelled...