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Informationen zum Autor Theodore Dreiser was one of the most influential American authors of his generation. His novels and nonfiction narratives, which he began publishing in his thirties, were controversial for their gritty realism, sexual frankness, and sympathy for the plight of underrepresented people. Klappentext This second and concluding volume of the great American novelist Theodore Dreiser's autobiography offers a compelling insider's view of the rough-and-tumble milieu of turn-of-the-century popular journalism, in what Dreiser himself calls "a period of orgy and crime". Following Dawn, Dreiser's candid account of his raw youth from 1871-1890 (reissued by Black Sparrow in 1998), Newspaper Days chronicles the would-be literary man's apprenticeship as reporter, travelling correspondent, drama editor and staff feature writer for papers in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and New York from 1890-1899.Recounted with all the vivid, gritty detail of Dreiser's best realist novels, the story here unfolds as a cautionary tale of innocence lost. (This annotated version restores the numerous sexually explicit passages cut from the first edition, published in 1922.)In 1890, with high hopes, nineteen-year-old Theodore takes a job on the Chicago Herald. "Because the newspapers were always dealing with signs and wonders -- great functions, great commercial schemes, great tragedies and pleasures -- I began to conceive of them as wonderlands in which all concerned were prosperous and happy". But four years and myriad harsh experiences later, he quits his job on the New York World. "The darksome atmosphere of this delinquent and defective world with which I was now connected... the mental nausea which the whole grim darksome city in its grey, snowy, blowy winter dress seemed to evoke, finally determined me to get out of the newspaper profession entirely, come what might, and cost what it might".What came, of course, was Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy, and the other novels which earned Dreiser alasting place in literary history. Zusammenfassung During Christmas 1891, Dreiser, age twenty-one and miserable as a bill collector in Chicago, decided to find a job as a reporter: “I conceived of newspapers as wonderlands in which all concerned were prosperous and happy. . . I was also determined to shake off the garments of the commonplace in which I seemed swathed and step forth into the public arena, where I could be seen and understood for what I was—a writer.” He at last found a slot at the Chicago Daily Globe , helping cover the 1892 Democratic National Convention. This, in turn, led to jobs with newspapers in St. Louis, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh—a scraping, unremunerative, eight-year journey through bustling railroad towns, with New York and Pulitzer’s World the final terminal. He started as a reporter, but found greater success as a feature writer, where he was better able to bend fact toward fiction. He specialized in lowlife stories, the research for which was a working education in the brutalities of life: “The police courts, the jails, the houses of ill repute, trade failures and trickery—it was all a grand magnificent spectacle:” a pageant of human weakness, wickedness, and survival through cunning and courage. “Everywhere I looked I found a terrifying desire for lust or pleasure or wealth, accompanied by a heartlessness which was freezing to the soul, or a dogged resignation to deprivation and misery.” He covered lynchings, streetcar strikes, robberies and murders—all of it testing his abilities as an observer and awakening the novelist within. It was the school that would prepare him for Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), and An American Tragedy (1925). First published in 1922 in what the editor calls an “expurgated abridgment,” Newspaper Days is here published in an edition based o...
