Literary Giant: Theodore Dreiser 发布时间：2007-8-15 21:27:31
ountain. In a sense this was a problem for younger writers. Each of them had to find his (or her) way around the mountain of Dreiser's naturalism. Some of them rejected the whole tradition of naturalism in literature.
Theodore Dreiser is one of America's greatest writers, and its greatest naturalist writer. With the publication of Sister Carrie in 1900, Dreiser committed his literary force to opening the new ground of American naturalism. His heroes and heroines,his settings, his frank discussion, celebration, and humanization of sex, his clear dissection of the mechanistic brutality of American society. All were new and shocking to a reading public reared on genteel romances and adventure narratives. Jennie Gerhardt,t\\e Cowperwood trilogy .and An American Tragedy expand and clarify those themes introduced in Sister Carrie. Dreiser's genius was recognized and applauded by H. L. Mencken,who encouraged him, praised his works publicly, and was always a valued editorial confidant, but the general reaction to Dreiser has always been negative. B. Life Dreiser was the ninth of 10 surviving children in a family whose perennial poverty forced frequent moves between small Indiana towns and Chicago in search of a lower cost of living. His father, a German immigrant, was a mostly unemployed millworker who subscribed to a stern and narrow Roman Catholicism. His mother's gentle and compassionate outlook sprang from her Czech Mennonite background. In later life Dreiser would bitterly associate religion with his father's ineffectuality and the family's resulting material deprivation, but he always spoke and wrote of his mother with unswerving affection. Dreiser's own harsh experience of poverty as a youth and his early yearnings for wealth and success would become dominant themes in his novels, and the misadventures of his brothers and sisters in early adult life gave him additional material on which to base his characters. Dreiser's spotty education in parochial and public schools was capped by a year (1889–90) at Indiana University. He began a career as a newspaper reporter in Chicago in 1892 and worked his way to the East Coast. While writing for a Pittsburgh newspaper in 1894, he read works by the scientists T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall and adopted the speculations of the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Through these readings and his own experience, Dreiser came to believe that human beings are helpless in the grip of instincts and social forces beyond their control, and he judged human society as an unequal contest between the strong and the weak. In 1894 Dreiser arrived in New York City, where he worked for several newspapers and contributed to magazines. He married Sara White in 1898, but his roving affections (and resulting infidelities) doomed their relationship. The couple separated permanently in 1912. Dreiser began writing his first novel, Sister Carrie, in 1899 at the sugge上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] 下一页
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