Trilogy desire

American Heritage in Dreiser`s novels

Theodore Dreiser dominated the American literary landscape in the first quarter of the twentieth century. To his contemporaries he seemed to have risen sui generis , like a newly formed volcano, and as Norman Mailer said, “Dreiser came closer to understanding the social machine than any other American writer who ever lived.” But he was more than a chronicler of social forces; he was a self-conscious artist, a literary pioneer, a bridge between the Victorian and the modern sensibility. His friend and critical champion H. L. Mencken summed up his importance: “American writing before and after Dreiser differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”
If Dreiser had published nothing after his first novel, Sister Carrie , in 1900, his place in American literature would still be secure. But he has written more, including the epic trilogy The Financiers, Giants, and Stoics, in which he traces the rise of financial capitalism and its own corruption. city ​​rights through the career of predatory traffic magnate Frank Cowperwood (based on King Charles Tyson's tram Yerkes). And his autobiographical novel Le “Genie” remains a powerful portrait of the artist in a business society.
These novels, plays, essays, travelogues, and short stories, and others he wrote before the 1920s, serve as ramparts of a distinguished era. Sherwood Anderson described what Dreiser meant to young writers beginning in the 1910s and 1920s: "This man overcame the wall of prejudices and foolish fears to the point of today. everyone who enters the profession of writing brings with them a new legacy of freedom." ⁸
Dreiser's career was full of pitfalls. As he once said, "Like a kite, I fly against the wind, not with it." He must find his way through a minefield of kindness, snobbery, and censorship. He was the first major American author to challenge censorship, both official and unwritten.
By the end of the 19th century, most women were buying and reading novels. These venerable publishers, fearing to offend the public, have practiced patriarchal self-censorship. The heroines are expected to be moral examples. "Sexual questions" are taboo, and the nation's ethics police, Anthony Cornstock, have threatened reputable publishers with lawsuits that could land them in jail if they break the rules. far-reaching obscenity that he helped write. Other novelists of Dreiser's generation, such as Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, broke the Victorian code, but Sister Carrie threatened to blow it up. William Dean Howells, a pioneer of realism and editor of Harper's Magazine, told Dreiser, "You know I don't like Sister Carrie. His comment describes the defender's reception. old.
To a new generation, Sister Carrie deals a blow to freedom. Lawyer and poet Edgar Lee Masters told the novelist, "When you're writing Sister Carrie, there's only one way to write a novel about women. It's to prove that in matters of Body's guilt. catholic…women were punished…. You have cleansed the country and spoken out for the truth…”. In 1912, Dreiser encouraged Masters to write his explicit epitaphs for the rural dead, which he did in Spoon River Anthology. The cost of telling the truth can be high, as Dreiser discovered early in his career. Her editor, Frank Doubleday, called Carrie immoral and unsalable, and the verdict became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Dreiser feared that her second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, would also be deemed inappropriate. It will tell about a sacrificial young woman having an illegitimate child with a US senator and a street love affair with the descendants of a wealthy family. Dreiser's anxiety prevented him from completing the book and sent him into a state of depression.