A journalist turned novelist, Dreiser was at the forefront of the battle for social fact and sexual candor in the early twentieth-century novel, treating popular sentimental and realist subjects with a refreshing lack of moralizing. Dreiser produced a number of dense, uneven, and controversial novels about the attempts of men and women to adapt themselves to the new urban, secular order of industrial capitalism. An American Tragedy (1925), Dreiser's great public success, is one of the first serious psychological studies of an American murderer.

Dreiser escaped a very poor and deeply religious upbringing through a successful career in journalism in the 1890s, writing his first novel, Sister Carrie, in 1900. Though the book had been recommended by rising author Frank Norris, publisher Doubleday's management was unhappy with what it considered the immorality of the story and published it without publicity. This, coupled with reviews uneasy with...