Book Description
Word count: 6386. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

twelve men
this book is great. dreiser tells the life of twelve men, whom all he knew except for one or two people. this book will keep u hooked ... Read more

Book Description
Now an abridged edition of two highly acclaimed volumes Praise for Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907 "Dreiser's life has never been more vividly told. Lingeman's definitive book reveals the tough, uncompromising impulse that led Dreiser, disdaining style, to slug with such knockout power." —Studs Terkel "Scrupulously, massively—devotedly—constructed; everything is in it. And it is immaculately rendered." —Cynthia Ozick The New York Times Book Review "An intimate and revealing portrait…a solid, honorable and perceptive book." —Jonathan Yardley The Washington Post Book World "A remarkable book packed with vivid reminiscences, personal anecdotes and thorough research that brings Dreiser's prodigious, moving story, his turbulent era and the man himself truly alive." —Don Skiles San Francisco Chronicle Praise for Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945 Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year, 1990 "A fascinating documentation of the most troubled life led by any important modern American writer." —Alfred Kazin The New York Times Book Review "It is hard to imagine that anything new or different will be said about Dreiser for a long time to come. Whatever a definitive biography may be, this is surely it." —Charles Fecher Chicago Tribune ... Read more

Book 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

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Customer Reviews (1)

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

HIGHLY recomended! ... Read more

Book Description
Reading the Symptom is concerned with naturalism; it is also necessarily concerned with capitalism as the complex-structuring whole within which naturalism operates and from which it cannot be disengaged. Tightly connected with this polemic assertion is a methodological proposition: naturalism-and by extension capitalism-is characterized not only by its logic, but also by its asymmetrical dynamism. Focusing on Frank Norris's McTeague (and its companion piece Vandover and the Brute) and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, this study argues that naturalism puts into question the very system it exemplifies. Naturalism has a transgressive element at its core, the appreciation of which calls for a special attention to the role and consequence of the emergent, the aleatory, and the stochastic. To explore the interplay between the systematic and the asystematic is not only to come to the conclusion that naturalism is an open, creative system, but also to realize that uneven development is the basic law of social formations. ... Read more

Book Description
Theodore Dreiser's Russian Diary is an extended record of the American writer's travels throughout the Soviet Union in 1927-28. Dreiser was initially invited to Moscow for a week-long observance of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He asked, and was granted, permission to make a extended tour of the country. This previously unpublished diary is a firsthand record of life in the USSR during the 1920s as seen by a leading American cultural figure. It is a valuable primary source, surely among the last from this period of modern history. ... Read more

Book Description
In this volume of reminiscences and correspondence, Theodore Dreiser's literary secretary and lover, the late Marguerite Tjader, re-created her professional and personal experiences with the novelist and many of his noted contemporaries. Along the narrative way, she also speaks about her editorship of the important left-wing magazine Direction during the late thirties and early forties. Her memoir is edited, prefaced, and endnoted by Dreiser scholar Lawrence E. Hussman (Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest). Also included are Dreiser's and Tjader's contributions to Direction. This book should establish once and for all that Dreiser was not the womanizer of myth but a thoughtful and sensitive lover, as well as one of the United States' greatest writers. ... Read more