Theodore Dreiser is best known for his novels. Of the eight that he wrote, An American Tragedy (1925), which was twice made into a motion picture, has attracted the most continuing interest. His short fiction is subsidiary to his novels, and his stories are sometimes capsule versions of his longer fiction, or novels in miniature. Additionally, Dreiser, more interested in literature’s power to educate than its ability to entertain, experimented with a variety of different forms in which to express his ideas, writing several autobiographical volumes, various books of essays, sketches, and accounts of his travels, as well as two books of plays and a collection of poems.

Dreiser remains one of the foremost naturalistic writers of the early twentieth century. Best known for his novels, particularly Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy, all the other works help illuminate them. Dreiser’s dark outlook and brooding style is leavened by his richness of language and compassion. His life and art have been closely examined in numerous book-length studies and critical pieces that range in the hundreds. He has been hailed as the most influential figure in American letters at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Mount Everest of American fiction, and he was considered the chief spokesman for the realistic novel. Dreiser was a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, but he lost in a close and bitterly contested vote to Sinclair Lewis, a rebuff that he never forgot. In 1944, the year before his death at age seventy-four, Dreiser was given the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for extraordinary achievement in his art.

The scope of literary accomplishment found in the work of Theodore Dreiser (DRI-sur) includes attempts in every major literary form, including autobiography and philosophy. Dreiser’s poetry is generally of poor quality; his plays have been produced on occasion, but drama was not his métier. His sketches, such as those included in The Color of a Great City (1923), are vivid and accurate, but they seem to be only workmanlike vignettes that Dreiser developed for the practice or for later inclusion in one of his many novels. His short stories are, like the sketches, preparation for the novels, but the compression of scene, character, and idea necessary for the short story lends these pieces a life of their own, distinct from the monolithic qualities of the novels. Dreiser’s philosophical works, such as Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub! (1920), and his autobiographical forays are the product of an obsession with explaining himself; the philosophy is often obscure and arcane, and the autobiography is not always reliable. Dreiser’s letters have been collected and offer further insight into the man, as do the massive manuscript collections that are the products of his tortuous composition and editing processes.

The enigma that is Theodore Dreiser divides the critical world into two clearly identifiable camps: those who despise Dreiser and those who honor him just short of adulation—there is no middle ground. 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 clear dissection of the mechanistic brutality of American society, and his frank discussion, celebration, and humanization of sex—all were new and shocking to a reading public reared on genteel romances and adventurenarratives. Jennie Gerhardt, the Cowperwood trilogy (at least the first two volumes), and An American Tragedy expand and clarify the themes introduced in Sister Carrie . Dreiser’s genius was recognized and applauded by H. L. Mencken, who encouraged him, praised his works publicly, and...