閱讀德萊塞 Theodore Dreiser在小说之家的作品!!! | |||
德莱塞1871年8月27日德萊塞生於印第安納州特雷浩特鎮。父母親是德國移民，篤信天主教。出生不久恰逢父親失業，童年在困苦生活中度過，曾和兄弟沿鐵路拾煤渣，幫母親去別人傢裏取衣服來洗勉強糊口度日。中學沒畢業就去芝加哥謀生，曾失業流落街頭。承老師的幫助，他上過一年大學。 1892年受聘為記者和編輯，走訪了芝加哥和紐約等城市，廣泛接觸和瞭解社會生活，開始寫些雜文，也為商業刊物寫故事。
1399年德萊塞轉嚮小說創作，翌年完成長篇小說《嘉麗妹妹》，由作傢弗蘭剋·諾裏斯推薦，與出版商簽訂了合同。但老闆讀了清樣，發現此書“有傷風化”，衹印了1000本，並且大部分封存在倉庫裏。德萊塞深受打擊，但沒有絶望。1911年又發表了《珍妮姑娘》，描寫窮姑娘珍妮和富傢子弟萊斯特相愛，後來孤獨死去的慘狀。德萊塞又遭無端非難，打了幾年官司，後來不瞭瞭之。另一部長篇小說《天才》拖到1923年纔出版。小說寫出一個才華出衆的畫傢的墮落，揭露了資本主義社會對藝術的毒害。作者又一次受到圍攻，許多知名作傢如孟肯、傑剋·倫敦和辛剋萊·劉易斯紛紛出面為他辯護。這使作者對社會環境有了深刻的認識。他堅持批判現實主義的創作道路，繼續發表了許多優秀作品。影響較大的有《欲望三部麯》，包括三部長篇小說《金融傢》（1912），《巨人》（1914）和《斯多葛》（1947）。 1925年，《美國的悲劇》正式出版，獲得了國內外的好評。
1927年11月，德萊塞應邀去蘇聯訪問。1931年發表了觀點鮮明的政論集《悲劇的美國》等，大膽地分析和抨擊了美國寡頭造成的種種危害。第二次大戰中他積極參加了反法西斯鬥爭。1945年8月加入美國，同年12月28日於加利福尼亞州的好萊塢病逝。
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.