Product Description
When Theodore Dreiser first published Sister Carrie in 1900 it was suppressed for its seamy plot, colloquial language, and immorality--for, as one reviewer put it, its depiction of "the godless side of American life." It was a side of life experienced firsthand by Dreiser, whose own circumstances often paralleled those of his characters in the turbulent, turn-of-the-century era of immigrants, black lynchings, ruthless industrialists, violent labor movements, and the New Woman. This masterful critical biography, the first on Dreiser in more than half a century, is the only study to fully weave Dreiser's literary achievement into the context of his life. Jerome Loving gives us a Dreiser for a new generation in a brilliant evocation of a writer who boldly swept away Victorian timidity to open the twentieth century in American literature.
Dreiser was a controversial figure in his time, not only because of his literary efforts, which included publication of the brutal and heartbreaking An American Tragedy in 1925, but also because of his personal life, which featured numerous sexual liaisons, included membership in the communist party, merited a 180-page FBI file, and ended in Hollywood. The Last Titan paints a full portrait of the mature Dreiser between the two world wars--through the roaring twenties, the stock market crash, and the Depression--and describes his contact with important figures from Emma Goldman and H.L. Mencken to two presidents Roosevelt. Tracing Dreiser's literary roots in Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and especially Whitman, Loving has written what will surely become the standard biography of one of America's best novelists. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Titanic
I have to disagree with the Publishers Weekly reviewer who states that Loving doesn't seem interested in finding out what made Theodore Dreiser tick.I walked away from this hurricane of a book feeling I knew TD inside out (and incidentally more than a bit about Loving as well)!A difficult figure to classify, Dreiser has been cursed for decades by having a friend like HL Mencken, a man who praised him to the skies on the one hand, but on the other let the whole world know his real opinion, that Dreiser was an oversexed drunk who couldn't write his way out of a paper bag.Mencken's tributes to Dreiser's "power" were like Norman Mailer's tributes to Muhammad Ali, to be honored more in the breach than in the observance.And thus generations of students and readers have only picked at Dreiser warily, feeling that some of his low-class trashy ways might rub off on them.

Loving at least has no fear, and walks in like an angel into a landscape littered with the corpses of previous biographers.He focuses Dreiser's development right at the mirror stage, as it were, with his intense relationship with Sarah, his mother, and a brooding, quarrelsome batch of siblings.Among them was the Indiana songbird, Psul Dresser (who changed his name from "Dreiser" for show biz reasons) who wrote many hit tunes for Tin Pan Alley before an untimely death.For some reason Loving feels it necessary to state, more than once, that Paul Dresser is forgotten today, but how true is that?Not very!And a film like "My Gal Sal," with Victor Mature and Rita Hayworth, Phil Silvers and Carole Landis--a Fox biopic of the songwriter--is every bit as good a film as the more portentous pictures drawn from Dreiser's own writings.I love Wyler's CARRIE and Stevens' PLACE IN THE SUN, but even Dreiser's greatest fans would admit theu're heavy sledding.

Loving takes particular pains with the first half of TD's life, the formative years, and lets the last half of his life slip by in a mere hundred pages, so he's actually skimming a bit, but one feels that the balance is essentially correct.I can't imagine a better biography of our weirdest novelist.Loving makes you want to read even the later books, like THE STOIC and THE BULWARK, books that haven't been cracked open since 1947.He explains the reasons why Mencken turned on Dreiser--basically Dreiser came to Baltimore to visit at a time when Mencken's mother was very sick, on her deathbed, upstairs, and he didn't even have the politesse to ask after the old woman.He was self-centered, true.Loving is also very good about explaining how old two fisted Dreiser wound up editing women's magazines at the turn of the century and how he changed their course, and how the demands of the profession changed his own writing, perhaps required him to spend more time thinking about women.Loving states that Dreiser was the first important US writer to have descended from a country other than England.Interesting, but it sort of negates the achievements of some black American novelists I think. ... Read more

Product Description
Four early novels by Dreiser are collected here with active table of contents. This edition includes:

The Financier
Sister Carrie
The Titan
Twelve Men ... Read more

Product Description
This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read Dreiser classics, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, as well as on topics of perennial interest, which include Dreiser's representation of the city and his prose style. The volume investigates his representation of masculinity and femininity, and his treatment of ethnicity, among other topics. ... Read more

Product Description
During Christmas 1891, Dreiser, age twenty-one and miserable as a bill collector in Chicago, decided to find a job as a reporter: "I conceived of newspapers as wonderlands in which all concerned were prosperous and happy. . . I was also determined to shake off the garments of the commonplace in which I seemed swathed and step forth into the public arena, where I could be seen and understood for what I was a writer." He at last found a slot at the Chicago Daily Globe, helping cover the 1892 Democratic National Convention.



This, in turn, led to jobs with newspapers in St. Louis, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh - a scraping, unremunerative, eight-year journey through bustling railroad towns, with New York and Pulitzer's World the final terminal. He started as a reporter, but found greater success as a feature writer, where he was better able to bend fact toward fiction. He specialized in lowlife stories, the research for which was a working education in the brutalities of life: "The police courts, the jails, the houses of ill repute, trade failures and trickery - it was all a grand magnificent spectacle:" a pageant of human weakness, wickedness, and survival through cunning and courage. "Everywhere I looked I found a terrifying desire for lust or pleasure or wealth, accompanied by a heartlessness which was freezing to the soul, or a dogged resignation to deprivation and misery." He covered lynchings, streetcar strikes, robberies and murders - all of it testing his abilities as an observer and awakening the novelist within. It was the school that would prepare him for Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), and An American Tragedy (1925). First published in 1922 in what the editor calls an "expurgated abridgment," Newspaper Days is here published in an edition based on Dreiser's original typescript. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (3)

Now I'll Have to Go Back ...
... and possibly re-read one of Theodore Dreiser's novels, probably "The Financier" or "The Titan", his exposés of the shaky ethical mentality of the American Self-Made Man. The stimulus for doing so would be my surprise at the quality of the five short stories in this Dover Thrift edition. I ordered this flimsy booklet just to fill out the $25 I needed for free shipping from amazon, whereupon I thought I might as well read it. The five stories, it turns out, were selected from a single collection by Dreiser published in 1918. Judging by this selection, the 1918 publication was not a random sheaf of magazine stories but rather a thematically unified "whole" not unlike the story collections of Alice Munro. These five stories are all set in the culture of the American Middle West, and all but one are tales of marriage. The first and last -- "Free" and "Married" -- are effectively mirror images of each other. In "Free" an aging architect frets his conscience about his lack of love for his dying wife, who has never satisfied his artistic expectations; in "Married" a young 'housewife' and her pianist husband fret each other over their mismatch and the sorry future it implies for both of them. The young have a way of becoming the old. And the very old couple in the story "The Lost Phoebe" provide a bittersweet counterpoint, a perfect match till death parts, and unites, them. "The Second Choice" is also a tale of romantic mismatch, reminiscent of Henry James in every way except writing style. The only story not devoted to the woes of marriage is about a young journalist assigned to report on a lynching in a northern prairie community. It's suitably ghastly.

My memories of Dreiser's novels -- Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy, and the financial trilogy, all of which I read forty-some years ago -- are of a writer whose 'realism' was ponderous and plain but eventually powerful. I had the idea that Dreiser knew how to write a novel but had no clue how to write a sentence. The novels are certainly long and slow, and Dreiser's language is, for the most part, unadorned. These five stories, however, are taut and affective. The language is sparse and blunt, but so were the 'people' about whom Dreiser wrote. There's a congruence between the language and the matter of the stories that now strikes me as masterfully crafted. The Midwestern America that Dreiser wrote about was, and still is, culturally sparse and emotionally blunt, a land of broad shoulders that too often sag into broader bellies. Dreiser belongs on the shelf with Hamlin Garland, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other regionalists of the northern states, whose works are less bizarre than those of the Southern Gothics but more 'relevent' to the human condition.

Powerful tales of the human condition
The Dover Thrift Edition of "Short Stories" by Theodore Dreiser contains five tales by this important American writer. The copyright page notes that the stories are reprinted from Dreiser's 1918 volume "Free and Other Stories." This Dover edition includes a historically relevant 1918 introduction by Sherwood Anderson.

The stories are as follows: "Free," in which an architect, facing the serious illness of his wife, reflects on his life and the choices he has made; "Nigger Jeff," a stunning tale that opens with a reporter getting a tip on a possibly imminent lynching; "The Lost Phoebe," a moving story that follows an elderly man after the death of his wife; "The Second Chance," in which a young woman is torn between two men, one exciting but impulsive, one dull but dependable; and finally "Married," about the conflict between a musician and his wife.

Dreiser's prose style is clear and strong. I was particularly intrigued by the problematic, ironic portrayal of the journalist in "Nigger Jeff." Overall, Dreiser demonstrates that he is an insightful and compassionate observer of the human condition.

the master of naturalism
The book consists of five stories.Especially the first three are so heartrending.The Lost Phoebe;the third story,is one of the most poignant and touching stories I have ever read.Being a naturalist,Dreiser's stylie is sometimes rather intricate and you may have to struggle with ambigious sentences,but it delves into human spirit deeply.At the very beginning Sherwood Anderson gives an introduction to the stories praising Dreiser's works.I guess it is a book worth reading. ... Read more

Product Description
An unflinching examination of the corrupted American dream, "The Financier" tells a story revolving around a fiercely dishonest and motivated businessman, Frank Cowperwood. This protagonist relentlessly maneuvers for wealth without scruples or compassion, first marrying an affluent widow, then embezzling funds. When stock markets crash, his lies are exposed, and he is used as a scapegoat for the corruption of others. Both a betrayer and the betrayed, the brutal reality of his later success after rising and falling into jail is the embodiment of greed in the American success story. Dreiser relates this 1912 tale, the first volume of his 'Trilogy of Desire', with a masterful use of naturalism that provides an unapologetic social critique through the character of Frank, an overwhelming and even haunting American businessman. ... Read more

Product Description
This book sheds light on the function of female sexuality in a predominantly male genre: naturalist fiction. Gammel reveals that naturalism is frequently implicated in the very power structures it critiques. Reading European and North American naturalism through the lens of feminist and Foucaultian theories of power, Gammel argues that twentieth century naturalism increasingly deconstructs itself in its depiction of sexuality, inevitably exposing the genre's internal ideological contradictions. The book makes a special contribution to Canadian studies. ... Read more

Product Description
1918. Contents: Free; McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers; Nigger Jeff; The Lost Phoebe; The Second Choice; A Story of Stories; Old Rogaum and His Theresa; Will You Walk Into My Parlor; The Cruise of the Idlewild; Married; When the Old Century Was New. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

A Must-Read for any Investor
This book is a must read for any investor. It is a good history lesson. It makes clear that economic bubbles and financial crises have the same causes in all centuries: excessive debt, secured by speculative assets. Once the collateral falls in price, the lender requires to repay the debt or add more collateral. Since the borrower have used excessive leverage, he is unable to handle the debt and goes bankrupt, which leaves the lender with illiquid assets. Here are some examples:

1871: Frank Cowperwood have used stocks of Philadelphia's railroads as a collateral to huge loans, and when the Great Chicago Fire sparked a financial panic, he could neither repay the debt nor add more collateral, thus became insolvent.
1929: Widespread use of margin, of up to 90% was one of the reasons of the Great Depression. The investor could buy $100,000 worth of stock with $10,000 of own cash, borrowing the remaining $90,000 from the broker. The sharp drop of the stock price made the investors unable repay the debt, they became insolvent. The brokers were left with cheap stocks and became insolvent also.
2007: The dot-com bubble of 2000 contributed to the housing bubble. Once stocks fell, real estate became the primary outlet for the speculative frenzy that the stock market had unleashed. The families were buying houses when they knew that they cannot afford the mortgage for a long time, they were buying only to sell it to later at higher price. The rise in home prices was very attractive for construction industry: the number of newly built houses have significantly increased. When the prices of the houses have fallen due to the balance between the supply and demand, the speculators who run out of cash to repay the mortgages could no longer sell the houses at a price they bought. This essentially led homeowners to foreclosures. The great amount of foreclosures have caused huge losses to the lenders, made them insolvent or put under Government's conservatorship, when the shareholder value was diluted if not wiped out.

While the first two book in the trilogy ("The Financier" and "The Titan") are not a skilled picture of smallest traits of a human soul when it comes to love and feelings, this final book, "The Stoic", covers the human soul better, but not as good as in writings by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (take "The Brothers Karamazov"). The book have an interesting final: one of the main characters finds the solution in the religion. This is also a famous outcome of the novels of Leo Tolstoy.

When it comes to the financial aspects of the book, they are very well covered. I recommend you to read the whole trilogy: "The Financier", "The Titan" and "The Stoic".
... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Fabulous
Lou Zanine has a gift for writing non-fiction.Very Insightful and involving.

HIGHLY recomended! ... Read more