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Informationen zum Autor American author and journalist Theodore Dreiser (1871-December 28, 1945) was a naturalist. In several of his works, the main characters achieved their goals despite the absence of a clear moral code. The best-known books of Dreiser are An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie (1900). John Paul Dreiser and Sarah Maria (née Schanab), his parents, welcomed him into the world in Terre Haute, Indiana. German immigrant John Dreiser came to Prussia from Mayen in the Rhine Province. Near Dayton, Ohio, Sarah was a native of a Mennonite agricultural village. Dreiser began working for newspapers in Chicago, Saint Louis, Toledo, Pittsburgh, and New York in 1892 as a reporter and theatrical critic. An American Tragedy, which was published in 1925, was Dreiser's first literary triumph. His older brother Paul Dresser, who rose to fame as a musician in the 1890s, was the subject of Dreiser's short tale "My Brother Paul." In 1918, he released his first collection of short tales, Free and Other Stories. The idea of poverty and ambition is continued in his poem "The Aspirant" from 1929. Klappentext Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time "Theodore Dreiser is a man who, with the passage of time, is bound to loom larger and larger in the awakening aesthetic consciousness of America. Among all of our prose writers he is one of the few men of whom it may be said that he has . . . never been a trickster. If there is a modern movement in American prose writing, a movement toward greater courage and fidelity to life in writing, Theodore Dreiser is the pioneer and the hero of the movement."--Sherwood Anderson Long before she was seduced by the cautious and ordinary man whose life she would unravel with no malice and only intermittent interest, the young Carrie Meeber was seduced by the promise of the city--its vitality and reckless possibility, the thrill of material luxury, and the spectacle of power and industry. Banned on publication for its questionable morals, Sister Carrie is the great American novel of seduction, a masterpiece of insight into appetite and innocence. "Such a novel as Sister Carrie stands quite outside the brief traffic of the customary stage. It leaves behind an inescapable impression of bigness, of epic sweep and dignity. It is not a mere story, not a novel in the customary American meaning of the word; it is at once a psalm of life and a criticism of life. . . . [Dreiser's] aim is not merely to tell a tale; his aim is to show the vast ebb and flow of forces which sway and condition human destiny. The thing he seeks to do is to stir, to awaken, to move. One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched."--H. L. MenckenWhen Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken. To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours—a few hundr...
