Theodore dreiser (1871-1945)

Theodore Dreiser was born in a poor family and after his school years he had to support himself by doing odd jobs. He worked in a laundry, was a rent collector and a newspaper reporter in different towns of the USA.

Dreiser was at the University only, a year, and he had to leave it because of money difficulties. Then he moved to New York where he began to work as a magazine editor.

Sister Carrie (1900) is Dreiser's first work. He de­scribes the life of Carrie Meeber, a poor country girl, who goes to Chicago in search of work. The second book Jennie Gerhardt (1911) got a hostile reception, too. Dreiser was boycotted by publishers, baited in newspapers and even persecuted by law. But he did not give in. He started his long fight for the right of, a writer to describe life as he saw it.

Dreiser's next books The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (L947) formed The Trilogy of Desire. Cowperwood, who is the chief character of all the three novels, is a typical representative of big business, he is a man of energy and wit, but cruel, corrupted, unscrupu­lous in his struggle for wealth and power.

An American Tragedy (1925) is Dreiser's masterpiece. It is a vast panorama of American social and political life. The action of the book centers about one individual Clyde Griffiths who believes that wealth alone makes people happy. He hates hard work and prefers to make money in an easy manner.

Spiritually backward, with no ideals, but a wish to gain success in the world, he is pushed on to the path of crime by the very system that surrounds him, and finally he comes to a tragic end. But this is not Clyde's personal tragedy, it is the tragedy of an average American, a typical case, born of American reality. Due to the great artistic power with which Dreiser presented this typical case, An American Tragedy is justly regarded as one of the best books in American literature.

An American Tragedy, like London's Martin Eden, explores the dangers of the American dream. The novel relates, in great detail, the life of Clyde Griffiths, a boy of weak will and little self-awareness. He grows up in great poverty in a family of wandering evangelists, but dreams of wealth and the love of beautiful women. A rich uncle employs him in his factory. When his girlfriend Roberta becomes pregnant, she demands that he marry her. Meanwhile, Clyde has fallen in love with a wealthy society girl who represents success, money, and social acceptance. Clyde carefully plans to drown Roberta on a boat trip, but at the last minute he begins to change his mind; however, she accidentally falls out of the boat. Clyde, a good swimmer, does not save her, and she drowns. As Clyde is brought to justice, Dreiser replays his story in reverse, masterfully using the vantage points of prosecuting and defense attorneys to analyze each step and motive that led the mild-mannered Clyde, with a highly religious background and good family connections, to commit murder.

Despite his awkward style, Dreiser, in An American Tragedy, displays crushing authority. Its precise details build up an overwhelming sense of tragic inevitability. The novel is a scathing portrait of the American success myth gone sour, but it is also a universal story about the stresses of urbanization, modernization, and alienation. Within it roam the romantic and dangerous fantasies of the dispossessed.

An American Tragedy is a reflection of the dissatisfaction, envy, and despair that afflicted many poor and working people in America's competitive, success-driven society. As American industrial power soared, the glittering lives of the wealthy in newspapers and photographs sharply contrasted with the drab lives of ordinary farmers and city workers. Such problems, common to modernizing nations, gave rise to muckraking journalism - penetrating investigative reporting that documented social problems and provided an important impetus to social reform.