Transcript Herman Theodore Dreiser

Herman Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie (1900)
An American Tragedy
(1925)
I. A brief biography

(born Aug. 27, 1871, Terre
Haute, Ind., U.S. — died
Dec. 28, 1945, Hollywood,
Calif.) U.S. novelist. Dreiser
was the foremost American
literary naturalist and author
of two of the most significant
works of early-twentiethcentury American fiction,
Sister Carrie (1900) and An
American Tragedy (1925).
I. A brief biography

Born to poor German
immigrant parents, Dreiser
left home at age 15 for
Chicago. He worked as a
journalist, and in 1894 he
moved to New York, where
he had a successful career
as a magazine editor and
publisher. His first novel,
Sister Carrie (1900), about a
young kept woman who
goes unpunished for her
transgressions （违犯; 犯
规）, was denounced as
scandalous.
I. A brief biography

Dreiser always thought of himself as a man of ideas-he had been deeply affected, for example, by
Herbert Spencer's evolutionary thought and by
Freud's theories--and he devoted the last two
decades of his life to philosophical speculation. But
like many American writers of the late 1920s and the
1930s, he was also increasingly drawn into social
activism and support of the far Left.
I. A brief biography

These interests culminated not long before his death
in his joining the Communist party in 1945 and
completing his long-delayed last two novels, The
Bulwark (1946) and The Stoic (1947), works in which
he expressed his final ideas about the relationship of
spirit to matter in humanity and in the universe.
I. A brief biography

A pioneer of naturalism
in American literature,
Dreiser wrote novels
reflecting his
mechanistic view of life,
a concept that held
humanity as the victim
of such ungovernable
forces as economics,
biology, society, and
even chance.
I. A brief biography

In his works, conventional morality is unimportant,
consciously virtuous behavior having little to do with
material success and happiness. While his style and
language tended to be clumsy and plodding, he
played an important role in introducing a new realism
and sexual candor（直白, 直率） into American
fiction.
I. A brief biography

After the success of Jennie
Gerhardt (1911), he began
writing full-time, producing a
trilogy consisting of The
Financier (1912), The Titan
(1914), and The Stoic
(published 1947), which was
followed by The Genius
(1915) and its sequel, The
Bulwark (published 1946).
An American Tragedy
(1925), based on a murder
trial, made him a hero
among social reformers.
II．Sister Carrie

1.Sister Carrie (1900)
is a novel by Theodore
Dreiser about a young
country girl who moves
to the big city where
she starts realizing her
own American Dream
by embarking on a life
of sin rather than by
hard work and
perseverance.
II．Sister Carrie


Theodore Dreiser based his first novel on the life of
his sister Emma. In 1883 she ran away to Toronto,
Canada with a married man who had stolen money
from his employer.
At the time of its first publication, the novel caused a
minor scandal and Dreiser had difficulty finding a
publisher for it. This was due to the blurred division
line between good and bad in the plot and the fact
that, at the end, Carrie is rewarded rather than
punished for her immoral life.
II．Sister Carrie

Although Dreiser's moralizing narrator does assert
that, despite the fame and the money she has
amassed, Carrie will not be able to achieve peace of
mind in her life, the apparent lack of poetic justice -the notion that immorality should pay in the end,
even if only up to a point -- was a concept the
reading public were altogether unused to at the time.
II．Sister Carrie

In addition to the book‘s
theme of sexual
impropriety （不适当,
不正当）, the public
disliked the fact that
Theodore Dreiser
presented a side of life
that proper Americans
did not care to
acknowledge.
II．Sister Carrie

He wrote about
infidelity and
prostitution as natural
occurrences in the
course of human
relationships. Dreiser
wrote about his
characters with pity,
compassion, and a
sense of awe.
II．Sister Carrie


2. Literary significance & criticism
In his Nobel Prize Lecture of 1930, Sinclair Lewis
said that "Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie,
which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and
which I read twenty-five years ago, came to
housebound and airless America like a great free
Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us
the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman".
II．Sister Carrie


It captures the exuberance (充沛，繁茂,生气勃勃)
and social transformation of turn-of-the-century
America. Littered with the nation's slang and its
distinctive personalities, the novel traces the
vagaries (变幻莫测) of fortune in the developing
capitalist society. Simultaneously a tale of rags-toriches and riches-to-rags, the novel confronts the
reader with a vision of both the comic and the tragic
aspects of American capitalism.