Literary Giant: Theodore Dreiser 发布时间：2007-8-15 21:27:31
stion of a newspaper colleague. Doubleday, Page and Company published it the following year, thanks in large measure to the enthusiasm of that firm's reader, the novelist Frank Norris. But Doubleday's qualms about the book, the story line of which involves a young kept woman whose “immorality” goes unpunished, led the publisher to limit the book's advertising, and consequently it sold fewer than 500 copies. This disappointment and an accumulation of family and marital troubles sent Dreiser into a suicidal depression from which he was rescued in 1901 by his brother, Paul Dresser, a well-known songwriter, who arranged for Theodore's treatment in a sanitarium. Dreiser recovered his spirits, and in the next nine years he achieved notable financial success as an editor in chief of several women's magazines. He was forced to resign in 1910, however, because of an office imbroglio involving his romantic fascination with an assistant's daughter. Somewhat encouraged by the earlier response to Sister Carrie in England and the novel's republication in America, Dreiser returned to writing fiction. The reception accorded his second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), the story of a woman who submits sexually to rich and powerful men to help her poverty-stricken family, lent him further encouragement. The first two volumes of a projected trilogy of novels based on the life of the American transportation magnate Charles T. Yerkes, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), followed. Dreiser recorded his experiences on a trip to Europe in A Traveler at Forty (1913). In his next major novel, The ‘Genius' (1915), he transformed his own life and numerous love affairs into a sprawling semiautobiographical chronicle that was censured by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. There ensued 10 years of sustained literary activity during which Dreiser produced a short-story collection, Free and Other Stories (1918); a book of sketches, Twelve Men (1919); philosophical essays, Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1920); a rhapsodic description of New York, The Color of A Great City (1923); works of drama, including Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916) and The Hand of the Potter (1918); and the autobiographical works A Hoosier Holiday (1916) and A Book About Myself (1922). In 1925 Dreiser's first novel in a decade, An American Tragedy, based on a celebrated murder case, was published. This book brought Dreiser a degree of critical and commercial success he had never before attained and would not thereafter equal. The book's highly critical view of the American legal system also made him the adopted champion of social reformers. He became involved in a variety of causes and slackened his literary production. A visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 produced a skeptical critique of that communist society entitled Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928). His only other signif上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] 下一页
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