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| The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser
ISBN: 9780520929111
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Dreiser Theodore 1871–1945; Novelists American -- 20th century -- Biography; Journalists -- United States -- Biography;
Dreiser (1871-1945), author of two of the most famous American novels in the naturalist school, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, rose from poverty to the top of the literary world, crossing paths with prostitutes and thugs (some of them his own siblings) as well as social reformers and presidents, all of whom informed the seemingly amoral universe of his fiction. It's easy to see why a biographer would be attracted to such rich subject matter. But Loving, biographer of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, has specific goals, which do not include painting a psychologically probing portrait of his subject (although one parenthetical aside suggests that Dreiser may have suffered from bipolar disorder-an intriguing and possibly groundbreaking idea that is dropped immediately). Instead, he races through the details of Dreiser's life in order to find the true antecedents and literary context of Dreiser's work. To do so, Loving turns to that work-whether books or magazine articles-for source material. While this account does the reader the favor of collecting all that material in one place and draws a thorough time line of Dreiser's life, it adds little to our knowledge of a major American writer. 47 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Loving Jerome :
Jerome Loving , Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M University, is author of Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (California, 1999), Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance (1993), and Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story (1986), among other books. He is editor of Frank Norris's McTeague (1995), Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1990), and Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman (1975). |
