Biography Essay

Henry David Thoreau, Living Thoughts of Thoreau, selected, with an introduction, by Dreiser (New York: Longmans, Green, 1938). Theodore Dreiser is one of the most significant and most problematical of American writers. The acknowledged "trailblazer" for a generation of early-twentieth-century American writers, his rebellious commitment to the honest portrayal of American life and the vagaries of human nature placed him in the forefront of American literature about the time of World War I and earned him a secure place in American literary history. The great popular and critical success of An American Tragedy in 1925 solidified his American and international reputations. But from the publication of Sister Carrie in 1900, Dreiser was also a byword for all that is inept in fiction and fuzzy in thinking. By the time Lionel Trilling launched his famous attack on him in 1950 (in Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, some five years after Dreiser's death...