• EXPLORING THE SOURCES OF DREISER’S NOVELS
• DREISER AND HIS CULTURE
• COMPARATIVE STUDIES

EXPLORING THE SOURCES OF DREISER’S NOVELS

1. Study Dreiser’s portrayal of his sisters in his autobiographical volume A History of Myself: Dawn. How are their experiences reflected in those of the title characters in Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt?

2. Using Dreiser’s autobiographical Newspaper Days as a source, compare his experiences with city life to the depiction of city life in Sister Carrie.

3. Discuss the similarities between Dreiser’s portrayal of poverty in Dawn and in Jennie Gerhardt.

4. In Dawn Dreiser describes his father as a stern, moralistic man and his mother as warm-hearted and nurturing. To what extent can Jennie’s parents in Jennie Gerhardt be said to resemble Dreiser’s parents?

5. In your school or public library look for information on Charles T. Yerkes. (The books listed in the American Social and Cultural History section of the Bibliography chapter are a good starting point.) What information can you find on Yerkes? In what ways does his life serve as a model for that of Frank Cowperwood in The Cowperwood Trilogy?

6. Consider the artistic sensibility of Eugene Witla in The “Genius.” What are the similarities between Witla’s work and that of the artists of the Ashcan School of American painting? (Key figures in the movement were John Sloan and William J. Glackens.)

7. Look for historical material on the Grace Brown-Chester Gillette murder case of 1906. (Biographies of Dreiser are one good source.) What details from the murder did Dreiser employ in the story of Clyde Griffiths and Roberta Alden in An American Tragedy?

8. What aspects of the Quaker religion are pertinent to the portrayal of Solon Barnes in The Bulwark?

DREISER AND HIS CULTURE

9. The New Woman movement of approximately 1890 to 1910 was concerned with helping women to achieve economic independence and sexual freedom. How are these issues of importance to the title characters in Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt?

10. Consider Carrie’s drama career in Sister Carrie. What does her experience reveal about the state of popular American theater at the end of the nineteenth century?

11. Using Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, and An American Tragedy as sources, discuss the significance of the hotel in American culture.

12. Consider how the behavior of Frank Cowperwood and Eugene Witla in The Financier and The “Genius,” respectively, violates conventional views of married life. What new ideas about marriage is Dreiser suggesting through these protagonists?

13. The friendship of Dreiser and H. L. Mencken was based in part upon their shared disdain for establishment culture in America. On what points were they in agreement about the limitations of this culture? Useful sources for exploration include Dreiser-Mencken Letters: The Correspondence of Theodore Dreiser & H.L. Mencken, 1907-1945, biographies of Dreiser, and Mencken’s reviews of Dreiser’s earlier books, which can be found in Theodore Dreiser: The Critical Reception. (The friends became estranged after Mencken’s harshly negative review of An American Tragedy in 1925.)

14. The legal issue in An American Tragedy is the guilt or innocence of Clyde Griffiths in the murder of Roberta Alden. Considering Clyde’s actions on the lake the day Roberta drowns, as well as his thoughts and actions leading up to the event, do you think he is guilty of murder in the first degree? Why or why not?

15. Dreiser novels are crammed with details about the material culture of his day. What can you learn from his books about the impact on daily life of such innovations as electric lights, streetcars, the department store, the automobile, the telephone, and so forth?

COMPARATIVE STUDIES

16. Compare and contrast the depictions of city life in Sister Carrie, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and Frank Norris’s McTeague.

17. How are the social critic Thorstein Veblen’s ideas on consumerism in The Theory of the Leisure Class confirmed by the consumer society depicted in Sister Carrie?

18. Compare the theme of the “sullied” but “pure” heroine in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbvervilles and Jennie Gerhardt.

19. How is the political corruption described in Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (1904) reflected in the corrupt city governments portrayed in The Financier and The Titan?

20. An American Tragedy can be read as a critical commentary on the “rags to riches” myth of American success embodied in such Horatio Alger novels as Ragged Dick (1868). In what ways does Clyde Griffiths’s downfall demonstrate the inadequacy of the Alger myth as a model for real-life success?

21. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby provides a critique of the Alger myth similar to that of An American Tragedy. Compare the ways in, which the two novels show how the myth is easily perverted, leading to destructive consequences.

22. Discuss the theme of crime and punishment in Richard Wright’s Native Son and An American Tragedy.

23. View A Place in the Sun, the 1951 motion-picture adaptation of An American Tragedy, and compare it to the novel; in what ways is the movie faithful to Dreiser’s book? In what ways does it diverge from the original story? Or, do the same for Carrie, the 1952 movie version of Sister Carrie.