Although Theodore Dreiser--generally considered the foremost writer in the tradition of American literary naturalism--is principally important as a novelist, he made a significant contribution to the development of short fiction. For while he needed a large canvas to achieve his best artistic effects, his stories and sketches, like his longer works, give uncompromisingly realistic pictures of human nature and social conditions, boldly defying the genteel tradition and defining a new honesty in American literature. Dreiser 's fiction, powerful, though unevenly written, conveys his compassionate observations of individual lives as they express the play of forces in nature and in the larger social world.

Theodore Dreiser was born on 27 August 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana, and was one of ten children of John Paul Dreiser, an indigent and often unemployed German immigrant, and his wife, the former Sarah Maria Schänäb. Theodore's earliest years were marked by...