Literary Giant: Theodore Dreiser 发布时间：2007-8-15 21:27:31
icant publications in the late 1920s were collections of stories and sketches written earlier, Chains (1927) and A Gallery of Women (1929), and an unsuccessful collection of poetry, Moods, Cadenced and Declaimed (1926). The Great Depression of the 1930s ended Dreiser's prosperity and intensified his commitment to social causes. He came to reconsider his opposition to communism and wrote the anticapitalist Tragic America (1931). His only important literary achievement in this decade was the autobiography of his childhood and teens, Dawn (1931), one of the most candid self-revelations by any major writer. In the middle and late '30s his growing social consciousness and his interest in science converged to produce a vaguely mystical philosophy. In 1938 Dreiser moved from New York to Los Angeles with Helen Richardson, who had been his mistress since 1920. There he set about marketing the film rights to his earlier works. In 1942 he began belatedly to rewrite The Bulwark, a novel begun in 1912. The task was completed in 1944, the same year he married Helen. (Sara White Dreiser had died in 1942.) One of his last acts was to join the American Communist Party. Helen helped him complete most of The Stoic, the long-postponed third volume of his Yerkes trilogy, in the weeks before his death. Both The Bulwark and The Stoic were published posthumously (1946 and 1947, respectively). A collection of Dreiser's philosophical speculations, Notes on Life, appeared in 1974.
C. Works Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), is a work of pivotal importance in American literature despite its inauspicious launching. It became a beacon to subsequent American writers whose allegiance was to the realistic treatment of any and all subject matter. Sister Carrie tells the story of a rudderless but pretty small-town girl who comes to the big city filled with vague ambitions. She is used by men and uses them in turn to become a successful Broadway actress while George Hurstwood, the married man who has run away with her, loses his grip on life and descends into beggary and suicide. Sister Carrie was the first masterpiece of the American naturalistic movement in its grittily factual presentation of the vagaries of urban life and in its ingenuous heroine, who goes unpunished for her transgressions against conventional sexual morality. The book's strengths include a brooding but compassionate view of humanity, a memorable cast of characters, and a compelling narrative line. The emotional disintegration of Hurstwood is a much-praised triumph of psychological analysis. Dreiser's second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), is a lesser achievement than Sister Carrie owing to its heroine's comparative lack of credibility. Based on Dreiser's remembrance of his beloved mother, Jennie emerges as a plaster saint with whom most modern readers find it diffic上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] 下一页
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