Books, Arts & Manners: Dreiser in Our Time

Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, by Richard Lingeman (Putnam, 478 pp., $22.95)

In this first volume of a projected two-volume biography, Richard Lingeman recounts the early life of Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser’s place in an impoverished, emotionally disorganized, and sexually unstable family of German-immigrant Catholics, his patch-work schooling, his sex-obsessed adolescence, and his potpourri of odd-job experiences leading up to a career as a journalist are here detailed in easily readable but figuratively overwrought prose. The volume ends with Dreiser’s composition of Sister Carrie (1900), its indifferent reception, and Dreiser’s nervous breakdown, culminating in literary paralysis. The second volume will cover Dreiser’s later career as the author of Jennie Gerhardt, the Cowper-wood trilogy, and (most memorably) An American Tragedy.

JT

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James W. Tuttleton

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Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, by Richard Lingeman (Putnam, 478 pp., $22.95)

In this first volume of a projected two-volume biography, Richard Lingeman recounts the early life of Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser’s place in an impoverished, emotionally disorganized, and sexually unstable family of German-immigrant Catholics, his patch-work schooling, his sex-obsessed adolescence, and his potpourri of odd-job experiences leading up to a career as a journalist are here detailed in easily readable but figuratively overwrought prose. The volume ends with Dreiser’s composition of Sister Carrie (1900), its indifferent reception, and Dreiser’s nervous breakdown, culminating in literary paralysis. The second volume will cover Dreiser’s later career as the author of Jennie Gerhardt, the Cowper-wood trilogy, and (most memorably) An American Tragedy.