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This study examines the genesis of Chicago's two identified literary renaissance periods (1890-1920 and 1930-1950) through the writings of Dreiser, Hughes, Wright, and Farrell. The relationship of these four writers demonstrates a continuity of thought between the two renaissance periods. By noting the affinities of these writers, patterns such as the rise of the city novel, the development of urban realism, and the shift to modernism are identified as significant connections between the two periods. Although Dreiser, Wright, and Farrell are more commonly thought of as Chicago writers, this study argues that Langston Hughes is a transitional, pivotal figure between the two periods. Through close readings and contextualization, the influence of Chicago writing on American literature--in such areas as realism and naturalism, as well as proletarian and ethnic fiction--becomes apparent. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fascinating book about a unlikeable man
Swanberg was a master biographer and his books almost always are well-researched and well-written.This one certainly is.And I found it greatly worth reading though one cannot help but be appalled by the subject: an adulterer many times over, quarreling with his friends as well as all his publishers, a man of unbelievable crudity, an admirer of both Stalin and Hitler, a rabid anti-Semite, a vicious anti-Catholic.While few books can equal the merit of Swanberg's classic Sickles the Incredible, this biography is eminently readable and holds one's attention to the last page.It is the ninth book by Swanberg I have read, and I admit I read this because I knew Swanberg did such a good job with his books, not because I was so interested in Theodore Dreiser. ... Read more

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Sister Carrie: a Novel. please visit www.valdebooks.com for a full list of titles ... Read more

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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. 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. ... Read more

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"Sister Carrie" is the story of Caroline 'Sister Carrie' Meeber, an eighteen-year-old girl living in rural Wisconsin. Dissatisfied with country life, Carrie takes a train to Chicago where she takes up an affair with a powerful gentleman and later pursues her dream of becoming a famous actress. "Sister Carrie" created some controversy when it was first published due to the uncommon consequences of Carrie's immorality, she ultimately profits in the end. A captivating tale that blurs the line between good and bad, "Sister Carrie" is a true American classic and one of Theodore Dreiser's finest literary achievements. ... Read more

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Terrible Copyediting!!!
hello all, my review for this book is based entirely on the quality of this text, not on the novel/story.Sister Carrie is a masterpiece and should be read by all, but this particular text is horrendous.The words "though" and "thoughT" are used interchangeably, words are left out of sentences, periods are placed randomly in the middle of sentences, and there are even instances where sections are repeated (i.e. six lines are followed by the exact six lines).

If you want to enjoy the Sister Carrie that Dresier wrote, do not buy this edition!You will be disappointed.Please order a text from a different publisher. ... Read more

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"Though far from the author's usual musings, this is actually a forerunner to the American road novel and very well could have been one of the inspirations for Jack Kerouac... this is a fine addition to public and academic libraries." -- Library Journal

"Theodore Dreiser, road warrior... Dreiser's account of his homecoming will touch a familiar and responsive chord in anyone who has undertaken one.... In that, as in so much else in this book, as in the great body of all his work, Dreiser in his earnest, heartfelt, clumsy way speaks to the universal experience." -- Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

"Because [the book] provides a portrait of the artist as a young man and describes the nation as a mosaic of individual cultures, Dreiser's journey offers several different lessons. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part collection of essays, A Hoosier Holiday lays out the landscape of a nation that ceased to exist once the highway unfurled across the map." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer living in New York. He had not been back to his home state in over 20 years. When his friend Franklin Booth approached him with the idea of driving from New York to Indiana, Dreiser's response to Booth was immediate: "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it." Along the route, Dreiser recorded his impressions of the people and land in words while his traveling companion sketched some of these scenes. In this reflective tale, Dreiser and Booth cross four states to arrive at Indiana and the sites and memories of Dreiser's early life in Terre Haute, Sullivan, Evansville, Warsaw, and his one year at Indiana University.

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Dreiser's motor trip back home to Indiana

In the summer of 1915, at a party in NYC for Edgar Lee Masters, illustrator Franklin Booth, a fellow Hoosier, asked Dreiser if he would care to accompany him on a motor trip to Indiana. Sensing the possibility of making a book out of the trip, Dreiser agreed. On August 11, Dreiser and Booth, along with a driver/mechanic named Speed, left NYC for the great midwest of their childhoods.

This, the book that resulted from the trip, is many things: travelogue, personal memoir, soap box for Dreiser's unorthodox beliefs, among other things. As a travelogue, it's relatively easy to trace their journey almost town to town (no maps are in the book) because Dreiser names many of them; he is also impressed by a lot of them and seems to be consistently enthused about what might be around the next bend. The year being 1915, one might assume they would've taken the newly established Lincoln Highway, but they didn't, electing to go via a more circuitous route through Scranton, Elmira, and Buffalo. Dreiser is obviously thrilled by motor travel and waxes ecstatically about it throughout the trip.

After reaching Indiana and visiting some old familiar places, Dreiser's comments are sometimes cynical and critical (especially of small-town attitudes and prejudices), but are also enthusiastic and proud (he has a Whitmanesque belief in the American people). But the reader must also endure sentences like these: "I often ask myself what it is all about, anyhow, and what are we here for, and why should anyone worry whether they are low or high, or moral or immoral. What difference does it really make?" Expressing sentiments like these is what kept Dreiser in trouble with the critics.

All in all, it's a very interesting book. Dreiser's muscular prose pulls the reader along, and most of what he has to say is still relevant. The only thing sorely missing is an index, which would be very helpful. Like all long car trips there are slow, dreary stretches, but not nearly enough to wish you stayed home.

Dreiser and Me
I read Sister Carrie when I was a teenager in China.The other day I listened to a Hoosier's holiday on Talking Books.He went back to his hometown after some thirty years.I went back to my hometown, Hangzhou,China and saw my old house now completely destroyed and replaced by a hugescaffolding.Somehow I felt my experience wasn't so different fromDreisers.I liked the book so much I'm going to order a copy to readcertain parts again, although I have been in Indianapolis exactly once inmy lifetime. Indianapolis and Hangzhou are world's apart.Dreiser and meare only 50 years apart but I feel I knew how he felt.Kai Lai Chung

Dreiser and Me
I read Sister Carrie when I was a teenager in China.The other day I listened to a Hoosier's holiday on Talking Books.He went back to his hometown after some thirty years.I went back to my hometown, Hangzhou,China and saw my old house now completely destroyed and replaced by a hugescaffolding.Somehow I felt my experience wasn't so different fromDreisers.I liked the book so much I'm going to order a copy to readcertain parts again, although I have been in Indianapolis exactly once inmy lifetime. Indianapolis and Hangzhou are world's apart.Dreiser and meare only 50 years apart but I feel I knew how he felt.Kai Lai Chung

The Wit, Wisdom, and Cynicism of Dreiser at its Very Best
Theodore Dreiser is one of America's great authors, but he is also an enigma wrapped inside a contradiction. Forever in awe of the "great social forces" lurching mankind forward, and inspired by the greatfinancial titans and clever capitalist geniuses who attempted to reap thewhirlwind, Dreiser nevertheless embraced communism late in his life as theantidote for the injustices plaguing mankind. He was a spirited socialrebel, railing against orthodoxy and Puritan "Babbitts" who wouldfoist their Midwestern morality down upon him, but at the same time, as hedemonstrates in this book, his idealization of the small-town Hoosierphilistines in Warsaw, Sullivan, and other whistle stop towns far removedfrom the Broadway footlights he had known intimately by the time this epicjourney to the Heartland commences. Dreiser devoted hundreds, perhapsthousands of pages of prose to attacking the small-town"Babbitts" sharing the views of another world-weary cynic, HenryLouis Mencken. And yet, for all his caustic attitudes toward rigidconventions, Dreiser swoons in near reverie after catching first glimpse ofthe mundane streets, the old grammar school, feed store, and the simplefolk he remembered from his youth. In other passages,examples of plaincountry living he encounters along the bumpy, dusty backroads of Americacirca 1914, are ridiculed and scorned as one would commonly expect ofTheodore Dreiser and his war against society's religious and socialconventions. Nevertheless, Dreiser's personal observations on life areoften more engaging and inciteful than in some of his later novels. He isan American master; a pioneer of literary realism, and despite thecontradictions, this is a fine and engaging volume exploring a vanishedAmerican landscape. Mr. Brinkley is to be commended for presenting it tothe reading public again after all these years. ... Read more

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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

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This file includes: Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914, and Twelve Men (1919). According to Wikipedia: "Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist. He pioneered the naturalist school and is known for portraying characters whose value lies not in their moral code, but in their persistence against all obstacles, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency... His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), tells the story of a woman who flees her country life for the city (Chicago) and falls into a wayward life. The publisher did little to promote the book, and it sold poorly[citation needed], however it was made into a 1952 film by William Wyler and starred Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones. He was a witness to a lynching in 1893, and wrote the short story "Nigger Jeff", which appeared in Ainslee's Magazine, in 1901.[4]
His second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was published in 1911. Many of Dreiser's subsequent novels dealt with social inequality. His first commercial success was An American Tragedy (1925), which was made into a film in 1931 and again in 1951. In 1892, when Dreiser began work as a newspaperman he "began to observe a certain type of crime in the United States that proved very common. It seemed to spring from the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown ambition to be somebody financially and socially." "Fortune hunting became a disease" with the frequent result of a peculiarly American kind of crime "many forms of murder for money...the young ambitious lover of some poorer girl...(for) a more attractive girl with money or position...it was not always possible to drop the first girl. What usually stood in the way was pregnancy."[citation needed] Dreiser claimed to have collected such stories every year between 1895 and 1935. The murder in 1911 of Avis Linnell by Clarence Richeson particularly caught his attention. By 1919 this murder was the basis of one of two separate novels begun by Dreiser. The 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette eventually became the basis for An American Tragedy. Though primarily known as a novelist, Dreiser published his first collection of short stories, Free and Other Stories in 1918. The collection contained 9 stories. Other works include The "Genius" and Trilogy of Desire (a three-parter based on the remarkable life of the Chicago streetcar tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes and composed of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic). The latter was published posthumously in 1947. Because of his depiction of unsavory aspects of life, such as sexual promiscuity in The "Genius", Dreiser was often forced to battle against censorship... Dreiser had an enormous influence on the generation that followed his. In his tribute "Dreiser" from Horses and Men (1923), Sherwood Anderson writes:
Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick some of his books to pieces, to laugh at him for so much of his heavy prose ... [T]he fellows of the ink-pots, the prose writers in America who follow Dreiser, will have much to do that he has never done. Their road is long but, because of him, those who follow will never have to face the road through the wilderness of Puritan denial, the road that Dreiser faced alone. F. R. Leavis remarked that Dreiser wrote as if he did not have a native language.Dreiser's heavy style, far from setting a trend for American writers, was eclipsed after the First World War by a simpler, more sparse style, as exemplified by Ernest Hemingway. Renowned mid-century literary critic Irving Howe spoke of Dreiser as "among the American giants, one of the very few American giants we have had." ... Read more

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This collection was designed for optimal navigation on Kindle and other electronic devices. All books included in this collection feature a hyperlinked table of contents and footnotes. The collection is complimented by an author biography.

Customer Reviews (4)

Outstanding
Works of Theodore Dreiser. The Financier, An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie, The Titan, Jennie Gerhardt & Twelve Men. Published by MobileReference (mobi)

Theodore Dreiser is one of the giants of American letters. Almost as epic as his novels was the constant state of warfare that existed between Dreiser and publishers who consistently refused to publish his books because of the shocking themes the author wrote about. Dreiser's observations are as relevant in the early 21st century as they were one hundred years ago. I highly recommend this ebook to those who love American literature.

Comments from the Publisher
We apologize for the inconvenience. The book was corrected on June 1st, 2009. The new version 10.3 has complete "Sister Carrie".

MobileReference

Impossible to Read
I didn't want to spend a lot on this so I bought the collection. You get what you pay for. I started reading Sister Carrie and in the first few paragraphs Ifound numerous annoying typos. As I read along, it didn't seem to make sense at all. I figured there was no way this guy could be such a terrible writer so I downloaded the sample of this book from the Barnes & Noble collection and compared the two. Indeed, I found that there are whole sections of sentences missing in the Mobil version. For example: one sentence reads: "A blare of to the astonished scenes in equivocal terms." The actual text reads: "A blare of sound, a roar of life, a vast array of human hives, appeal to the astonished senses in equivocal terms." There are several instances of missing words in the first few paragraphs alone, as well as missing punctuation and nonsensical spelling. You can't read this!I'm trashing it and buying the real thing.

compelling novel
Works of Theodore Dreiser. The Financier, Sister Carrie, The Titan and Twelve Men. Published by MobileReference (mobi)

Dreiser's novels effect the lives of everyone who reads them. I this ebook to everyone. It will leave you thinking and thinking and thinking. ... Read more

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About Dawn: An Autobiography of Early Youth Published in 1931, just as the country was entering the darkest days of the Great Depression, Dawn is a major American writer's engrossing effort to understand how he had become the person that he was. It opens in a small house on a dingy street in Terre Haute, Indiana, where the author is born, the ninth of ten children, on August 27, 1871. Central to Dreiser's story is his Czech mother's struggle to keep her family together in the face of chronic poverty and her husband's inability to earn a living. She is all-enduring and all-forgiving, one of Dreiser's triumphs of characterization. The father, a disabled German Catholic millworker, is pitiful, luckless, and powerless to impress his moral authority on his indifferent children, all of whom are magnetized by pleasure and material display. They are the musically talented Paul, a simple-hearted, generous sensualist; the sullen Rome, an amoral wanderer, often in jail, always full of drink and braggadocio; the four sisters, looking only for fun, finery, and handsome moneyed young men; and Theodore, sickly, withdrawn, finding beauty in nature and in books but little solace from his inborn fatalism. ... Read more

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read this from dusk till d-d-dawn
Dreiser follows such a simple structure. First, the dreamy, hypnotic recurrent images of early childhood, that only melted into perspective years later. Second, the glory of sexual awakening, mixed with the whitewater current of ambition, shuffling like white noise into his consciousness only once he tunes his ears to listen.
To the details. Dreiser loved his mother, in a way that may have swung past the platonic, and certainly shaped his female ideal. She does seem an ideal parent, with her selfless love, endless devotion in hard work, and support regardless of the wayward tendencies of her iconoclastic brood. His father seems little more than a hollowed out Jesus enthusiast, who, following the personal disaster that surely damaged his brain, emptily follows Christ's lead by punishing his children for not being religious enough.
Dreiser himself came of age by losing it to the immigrantbakery owner's daughter, an idle miscreant long forgotten outside these pages. Dreiser was bound by two diametrically opposed desires - one for sex, the other for love, and as a wise man once said, these rarely overlap, especially for Dreiser in his early youth.His platonic ideal is the shy, frumpy type, while he can't help but be lured in by the pretty ones. His sex complex keeps him from many a lay, which he overcomes by ravishing a young Italian waywardess.
Poe once said something like "Any man who chooses to tell about his life the way it really is will change the world forever, but no one has the courage to do it." Dreiser comes close, though I doubt this has stood much ground the test of time.I was referred to it by one of Fitzgerald's early characters. Dreiser doesn't hesitate to wag his finger at himself, and never, ever makes me wish not to have had the golden opportunity to join him for lunch of a foggy Tuesday.

Dreiser On Dreiser Is Still Dry, Sir.
Although he published this volume (second after Newspaper Days, chronologically), Dreiser intended Dawn to be the first of four autobiographies, each covering approximately 20 years of his life. This confirms Dreiser's ambition, but doesn't place this book in the prize category of great autobiographical works. For all of his professed candor, Dreiser still skirts personal truths for the protocol, and his sentences wind and ramble and repeat like an electric train on contorted tracks.
If you liked Sister Carrie and some of his other longer fictions, this extra reading may be helpful, but if you want to go for the "red meat" of Dreiser's life, I'd encourage a reading of his American Notebooks--his journals, published after his death and never really intended for publication. In them, boy oh boy, does the real Dreiser sans facade emerge.

Incredible Memoir Writing
"Dawn" may be stronger than Dreiser's fiction, which is saying a good deal.He shows a remarkable memory and attention to detail.I am admittedly biased because I identified so closely with his experiences as a child, youth, and adult, but the scenes in this volume are well drawn and he overcomes his sometimes florid style and difficulties with fluid language well here.Along with "Newspaper Days," one gets an intimate look at the life of this talented and important author. ... Read more

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