Conclusion glossary referece

An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s second major novel was published in 1925. The novel is based on an actual murder—The Chester GilletteGrace Brown case. It describes the slow process that leads a young man to murder his girlfriend because he fears she will be an obstacle to his social advancement. The tone of the novel is markedly more disenchanted than in Sister Carrie, The Financier and The Titan.
By the 1920s, Dreiser had indeed become disillusioned with capitalist America. In the mid1920s, he visited the Soviet Union, a trip recorded in Dreiser Looks at Russia. In 1931, Dreiser and novelist John Dos Passos were arrested as they were investigating mining conditions in Kentucky
In his later years, Dreiser turned to vitalist mysticism, Hinduism, and Eastern Philosophies—a philosophical evolution reflected in The Stoic.
Besides novels, Dreiser published autobiographical writings—A Traveler at Forty ; A Book about Myself / Newspaper Days —and theoretical/philosophical essays.
As a literary personality, Dreiser has always been a controversial figure. On the one hand, he is regarded as the leading figure of American naturalism—the author of novels that are true to their social environment yet also display supreme imaginative energy. Still, Dreiser is not regarded as a good writer in the belletristic sense of the term: unlike Henry James, he did not seek to write well-crafted literary objects.Dreiser’s writing style has been a perennial object of complaints among critics. It has been argued that Dreiser never learned to master elegant prose-writing skill because of his non-Anglo-Saxon , non-genteel background. In a positive light, the rough character of his prose has been described as the proper medium for a self-taught genius.
Still, in one respect, the looseness of Dreiser’s writing raises an important problem for a realist writer. Dreiser, unlike Edith Wharton and Henry James, seems unable to handle realistic irony and demystification. It is not always clear in Dreiser’s novel how author are expected to position themselves towards the narrative and the characters.
In 1981, a new text of Sister Carrie was published by a team of editors at the University of Philadelphia .The new text corresponds to Dreiser’s initial manuscript, before it was processed by the editor at Doubleday and by Dreiser’s first wife. The writing style of the “Philadelphia” edition is indeed rougher than the 1900 Doubleday text. The novel is also longer, grittier, and more pessimistic.
By the 1980s, Dreiser’s politics—and no longer his writing style—became an object of controversy. A new generation of critics embarked on a re-evaluation of realism and naturalism. They argue that American naturalist writers were not anticapitalist left-wingers, as most critics had argued thus far. There are indeed ambiguities in Dreiser’s politics: is he a socialist or a champion of consumerism? How can we interpret the Nietzschean features of his novels? This issue can be partly solved, however, by taking his personal development into account. Dreiser’s support of socialism is a feature of the second part of his career. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser’s attitude to urban consumerism was ambivalent—a mixture of fascination and criticism. There are ambiguities in Dreiser’s relation to science and religion as well. He often profiles himself as an evolutionary positivist, influenced by Darwin and Spencer. Yet there are also accents of vitalist mysticism in his texts.
Sister Carrie is one of the first American novels of urban life, or, to be more accurate, one of the first US novels of the metropolis. Novels of the metropolis are literary texts whose object is an urban expanse too large, varied, and unfamiliar to be represented as a knowable community. In this respect, novels of the metropolis differ from realist novels by Edith Wharton or Henry James, which focus on one single aspect of urban life—the rituals of the classes—and may therefore approach this social field as if it were a village or a small town. A few American novels of the metropolis had been published before Sister Carrie, but they either had a lesser impact than Dreiser’s novel, or do not quite have its breadth of scope:

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  William Dean Howells: A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)
  
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  Stephen Crane: Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893)
  
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  Hamlin Garland: Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895)
  

Robert Herrick: The Gospel of