Dreiser, Theodore [Herman Albert]
Dreiser, Theodore [Herman Albert]( 1871–1945),born at Terre Haute, Ind., of a poor and intensely religious family, who taught him to shun many human experiences as degrading or destructive. He early developed a yearning for wealth, society, and the kind of life which he later gave to his hero Cowperwood, an unscrupulous magnate of big business, who is the subject of an exhaustive character study in The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947).
After a period of newspaper reporting in St. Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York, stimulated by reading Balzac, and released from his crass success-worship by studying Huxley, Tyndall, and Spencer, he came to see life as a strangely magnificent composite of warring energies, having no plan or purpose. His journalism and hackwork were temporarily interrupted by the writing of Sister Carrie (1900), the story of a working girl and her life as the mistress of a man who...
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