This collection of Dreiser's early periodical writings covers his articles on American literary figures; art and music criticism; the American landscape; and science, technology, and industry; and his writings about the changing social conditions in American cities that he later drew on in his naturalistic novels.
This edition of Dreiser's work consists of thirty-four uncollected magazine articles published between 1897 and 1902. In this period, before wrting 'Sister Carrie', Dreiser contributed 111 freelance articles to various popular magazines, such as 'Success', 'Truth', 'Metropolitan', 'Cosmopolitan', 'Ainslee's', 'Demorest's', 'Munseys', 'Puritan', 'New Voice', 'Great Round World', 'Harper's Weekly', and 'New York Times Illustrated Magazine'. A great majority of these magazine articles have been collected in two previous editions;, including 'Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser: Life and Art in the American 1890s', published y Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Yoshinobu Hakutani is Distinguished Professor of English at Kent State University.
For a century, Theodore Dreiser has represented for many readers a rebellious modernism whose novels both critiqued the American dream and embodied a bleakly deterministic perception of life. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), was reluctantly published and then ignored by its publisher, who thought the book immoral. Another publisher withdrew his fifth novel, The Genius (1915), rather than face prosecution on obscenity charges. Dreiser did not enjoy widespread popularity and critical acclaim until his masterpiece, An American Tragedy, appeared in 1925. This reference is an authoritative guide to his life and works. Included are several hundred entries on each of Dreiser's books and short stories, as well as magazine and newspaper pieces he collected during his life. Noteworthy uncollected and posthumously collected works are given separate entries, as are major characters in the novels, family members, friends, and other persons important to understanding his writings. There are also entries on Dreiser's publishers, his major influences, the places and events important to his life, and the literary and social contexts of his works. Expert contributors wrote each of the entries, many of which cite works for further reading. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of works by and about Dreiser.
Theodore Dreiser is one of the most penetrating observers of the greatest period of social change the United States ever saw. Writing as America emerged as the world's wealthiest nation, Dreiser chronicled industrial and economic transformation and the birth of consumerism with an unmatched combination of detail, sympathy, and power. The specially commissioned essays collected in this volume are written by a leading team of scholars of American literature and culture. They establish parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Dreiser. This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read classics, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Dreiser's representation of the city and his prose style. The volume investigates topics such as his representation of masculinity and femininity, and his treatment of ethnicity. It is the most comprehensive introduction to Dreiser's work available.
"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 to Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and especially Whitman, Loving adds a dimension to the writer's thought that has not been fully explored, and reshapes our understanding of his tremendous contribution to American literature in what will surely become the standard biography of one of America's best novelists."--BOOK JACKET.
Praise for the earlier edition: "Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--Sixteenth Modern American Authors--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains."--American Studies
Hardly shy about himself or his work, Theodore Dreiser knew the value of publicity. Over four decades he often consented to interviews, answering questions about his fiction, his politics, and even previous interviews. Throughout his life Dreiser raised a storm of protest with his realistic novels, blistered public figures and other authors with untempered criticism, scorned pieties masking brutality in law and economics, and expressed a few contradictions of his own. This volume collects for the first time more than seventy interviews. As a group, they show Dreiser dealing with an array of literary and social issues, as well as his lifelong incapacity to mince words. Dreiser is revealed in these interviews as a public figure of epic proportions.
