Background
Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Aug. 27, 1871, the twelfth of thirteen children.
Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Aug. 27, 1871, the twelfth of thirteen children.
Dreiser's education was irregular, but, with help from a sympathetic high school teacher, he spent the year 1889–90 at the University of Indiana.
Handicapped by poverty, narrow religious training, and a dreamer's temperament, he was unprepared for the inevitable hurly-burly of earning a living, and his experiences in miscellaneous jobs in Chicago from 1866 to 1891, a year at Indiana University (1889-1890), and newspaper work from 1892 to 1895 in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York disillusioned him deeply by revealing an amoral world that contradicted the teachings of his childhood. A chance reading of Herbert Spencer in 1894 crystallized this disillusionment for Dreiser into a philosophy which envisioned men as helpless victims of natural forces, and when he also discovered Balzac, he perceived how this philosophy might be expressed in fiction. After a brief period working for magazines from 1895 to 1900, he thus proceeded to write Sister Carrie (1900), a novel about a girl who becomes a married man's mistress and a successful actress while her lover degenerates to beggary and suicide.
Began newspaper work, Chicago Globe, June 15, 1891. Dramatic editor and traveling correspondent St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 1892-1893. Traveling correspondent St. Louis Republic, 1893-1894.
Editor Every Month, 1895-1896. Subsequently special work for Harper’s, McClure’s, Century, Cosmopolitan and Munsey’s. Editor of Smith’s Magazine, 1905-1906.
Managing editor Broadway Magazine, 1906-1907. Editor-in-chief of the Butterick Publs. (Delineator, Designer, New Idea, English Delineator), 1907-1910.
Organized National Child Rescue Campaign, 1907.
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 (NCDPP) 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.[