Theodore Dreiser(1871-1945)

Theodore Dreiser was one of the great American writers, and a transitional figure between Victorian America and the "modern" age that was inaugurated after the cessation of hostilities after WWI and the publication of Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street" in 1920. A naturalist with a committed social conscience (Dreiser was a socialist in a time when socialists were an established third party and had many mayoral posts and seats in state legislatures before the post-WWI "Red Scare" wiped out socialism in the U.S.), Theodore Dreiser is a seminal figure in the evolution of American letters to a more mature literature.

Born on August 27, 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana, he was the twelfth of thirteen children Born to John Paul & Sarah Dreiser, ten of whom survived infancy. Theordore's Dreiser's father, John, was a German immigrant and a strict Baptist. His mother Sarah came from a Mennonite community who later converted to Roman Catholicism. His older brother Paul Dresser became a famous songwriter.

Theodore Dreiser attended Indiana University from 1889 to 1890, but flunked out and became a journalist in Chicago and St. Louis. He married the former Sara White in 1898, but the marriage failed and they separated in 1909. Dreiser never divorced his wife.

His first novel "Sister Carrie" was published in 1900. It is considered a classic and a seminal piece of American literature. The publisher did not promote the novel, likely due to its controversial subject matter (adultery, extramarital sex), and the book sold poorly. He did not score a best-seller for a quarter-of-century, until "An American Tragedy" in 1925. (The novel was made into George Stevens 1951 masterpiece A Place in the Sun (1951).

Theodore Dreiser died on December 28, 1945, not long after he had joined the Communist Party, a move that Ernest Hemingway said was that of an old man trying to save his soul.