阅读德莱塞 Theodore Dreiser在小说之家的作品!!! | |||
德莱塞1871年8月27日德莱塞生于印第安纳州特雷浩特镇。父母亲是德国移民，笃信天主教。出生不久恰逢父亲失业，童年在困苦生活中度过，曾和兄弟沿铁路拾煤渣，帮母亲去别人家里取衣服来洗勉强糊口度日。中学没毕业就去芝加哥谋生，曾失业流落街头。承老师的帮助，他上过一年大学。 1892年受聘为记者和编辑，走访了芝加哥和纽约等城市，广泛接触和了解社会生活，开始写些杂文，也为商业刊物写故事。
1399年德莱塞转向小说创作，翌年完成长篇小说《嘉丽妹妹》，由作家弗兰克·诺里斯推荐，与出版商签订了合同。但老板读了清样，发现此书“有伤风化”，只印了1000本，并且大部分封存在仓库里。德莱塞深受打击，但没有绝望。1911年又发表了《珍妮姑娘》，描写穷姑娘珍妮和富家子弟莱斯特相爱，后来孤独死去的惨状。德莱塞又遭无端非难，打了几年官司，后来不了了之。另一部长篇小说《天才》拖到1923年才出版。小说写出一个才华出众的画家的堕落，揭露了资本主义社会对艺术的毒害。作者又一次受到围攻，许多知名作家如孟肯、杰克·伦敦和辛克莱·刘易斯纷纷出面为他辩护。这使作者对社会环境有了深刻的认识。他坚持批判现实主义的创作道路，继续发表了许多优秀作品。影响较大的有《欲望三部曲》，包括三部长篇小说《金融家》（1912），《巨人》（1914）和《斯多葛》（1947）。 1925年，《美国的悲剧》正式出版，获得了国内外的好评。
1927年11月，德莱塞应邀去苏联访问。1931年发表了观点鲜明的政论集《悲剧的美国》等，大胆地分析和抨击了美国寡头造成的种种危害。第二次大战中他积极参加了反法西斯斗争。1945年8月加入美国，同年12月28日于加利福尼亚州的好莱坞病逝。
Early life
Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Sarah and John Paul Dreiser, a strict Catholic family. John Paul Dreiser was a German immigrant and Sarah was from the Mennonite farming community near Dayton, Ohio; she was disowned for marrying John and converting to Roman Catholicism. Theodore was the twelfth of thirteen children (the ninth of the ten surviving). The popular songwriter Paul Dresser (1859–1906) was his older brother.
From 1889 to 1890, Theodore attended Indiana University before dropping out.[citation needed]. Within several years, he was writing for the Chicago Globe newspaper and then the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He wrote several articles on writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Israel Zangwill, John Burroughs, and interviewed public figures such as Andrew Carnegie, Marshall Field, Thomas Edison, and Theodore Thomas. Other interviewees included Lillian Nordica, Emilia E. Barr, Philip Armour and Alfred Stieglitz. After proposing in 1893, he married Sara White on December 28, 1898. They ultimately separated in 1909, partly as a result of Dreiser's infatuation with Thelma Cudlipp, the teenage daughter of a work colleague, but were never formally divorced.
Literary career
His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), tells the story of a woman who flees her country life for the city (Chicago) and falls into a wayward life. It sold poorly, but it later acquired a considerable reputation. (It was made into a 1952 film by William Wyler, which starred Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones.)
He was a witness to a lynching in 1893 and wrote the short story, " Cracker," which appeared in Ainslee's Magazine in 1901.
His second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was published in 1911. Many of Dreiser's subsequent novels dealt with social inequality. His first commercial success was An American Tragedy (1925), which was made into a film in 1931 and again in 1951. In 1892, when Dreiser began work as a newspaperman he "began to observe a certain type of crime in the United States that proved very common. It seemed to spring from the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown ambition to be somebody financially and socially." "Fortune hunting became a disease" with the frequent result of a peculiarly American kind of crime "many forms of murder for money...the young ambitious lover of some poorer girl...(for) a more attractive girl with money or position...it was not always possible to drop the first girl. What usually stood in the way was pregnancy." Dreiser claimed to have collected such stories every year between 1895 and 1935. The murder in 1911 of Avis Linnell by Clarence Richeson particularly caught his attention. By 1919 this murder was the basis of one of two separate novels begun by Dreiser. The 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette eventually became the basis for An American Tragedy.
Though primarily known as a novelist, Dreiser published his first collection of short stories, Free and Other Stories in 1918. The collection contained 11 stories. A particularly interesting story, "My Brother Paul", was a brief biography of his older brother, Paul Dreiser, who was a famous songwriter in the 1890s. This story was the basis for the 1942 romantic movie, "My Gal Sal".
Other works include The "Genius" and Trilogy of Desire (a three-parter based on the remarkable life of the Chicago streetcar tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes and composed of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic). The latter was published posthumously in 1947.
Because of his depiction of then-unaccepted aspects of life, such as sexual promiscuity, Dreiser was often forced to battle against censorship.
Political commitment
Politically, Dreiser was involved in several campaigns against social injustice. This included the lynching of Frank Little, one of the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the deportation of Emma Goldman, and the conviction of the trade union leader Tom Mooney. In November 1931 Dreiser led the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners to the coalfields of southeastern Kentucky, where they took testimony from coal miners in Pineville and Harlan on the violence against the miners and their unions by the coal operators.
Dreiser was a committed socialist, and wrote several non-fiction books on political issues. These included Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), the result of his 1927 trip to the Soviet Union, and two books presenting a critical perspective on capitalist America, Tragic America (1931) and America Is Worth Saving (1941). His vision of capitalism and a future world order with a strong American military dictate combined with the harsh criticism of the latter made him unpopular within the official circles. Although less politically radical friends, such as H.L. Mencken, spoke of Dreiser's relationship with communism as an "unimportant detail in his life," Dreiser's biographer Jerome Loving notes that his political activities since the early 1930s had "clearly been in concert with ostensible communist aims with regard to the working class." .
The author died on December 28, 1945 in Hollywood, aged 74.
Legacy
Dreiser had an enormous influence on the generation that followed his. In his tribute "Dreiser" from Horses and Men (1923), Sherwood Anderson writes:
Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick some of his books to pieces, to laugh at him for so much of his heavy prose ... [T]he fellows of the ink-pots, the prose writers in America who follow Dreiser, will have much to do that he has never done. Their road is long but, because of him, those who follow will never have to face the road through the wilderness of Puritan denial, the road that Dreiser faced alone.
Alfred Kazin characterized Dreiser as "stronger than all the others of his time, and at the same time more poignant; greater than the world he has described, but as significant as the people in it," while Larzer Ziff (UC Berkeley) remarked that Dreiser "succeeded beyond any of his predecessors or successors in producing a great American business novel." Arguably, Dreiser succeeded beyond any of his predecessors or successors in producing the great American novel.
Renowned mid-century literary critic Irving Howe spoke of Dreiser as "among the American giants, one of the very few American giants we have had." A British view of Dreiser came from the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis: "Theodore Dreiser's books are enough to stop me in my tracks, never mind his letters — that slovenly turgid style describing endless business deals, with a seduction every hundred pages as light relief. If he's the great American novelist, give me the Marx Brothers every time."
One of Dreiser's strongest champions during his lifetime, H.L. Mencken, declared "that he is a great artist, and that no other American of his generation left so wide and handsome a mark upon the national letters. American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin. He was a man of large originality, of profound feeling, and of unshakable courage. All of us who write are better off because he lived, worked, and hoped."
Dreiser's great theme was the tremendous tensions that can arise among ambition, desire, and social mores.
In 2008, The Library of America selected Dreiser’s article “Dreiser Sees Error in Edwards Defense” for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.
Selected bibliography
Fiction
* Sister Carrie (1900)
* "Old Rogaum and His Theresa" (1901)
* Jennie Gerhardt (1911)
* The Financier (1912)
* The Titan (1914)
* The "Genius" (1915)
* Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916)
* Free and Other Stories (1918)
* The Hand of the Potter (1918)
* Twelve Men (1919)
* An American Tragedy (1925)
* Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories (1927)
* A Gallery of Women (1929)
* The Bulwark (1946)
* The Stoic (1947)
Nonfiction
* A Traveler at Forty (1913)
* A Hoosier Holiday (1916)
* Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life (1920)
* A Book About Myself (1922); republished (unexpurgated) as Newspaper Days (1931)
* The Color of a Great City (1923)
* Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928)
* My City (1929)
* Tragic America (1931)
* Dawn (1931)
* America Is Worth Saving (1941)
Published as
* Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men (Richard Lehan, ed.) (Library of America, 1987) ISBN 978-0-94045041-7.
* An American Tragedy (Thomas P. Riggio, ed.) (Library of America, 2003) ISBN 978-1-93108231-0.