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The Rise of Realism: 1860-1914

June 13, 2024

American Literature of the second half of the 19 c. – beginning of the 20 c.

The Rise of Realism: 1860-1914

The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) between the industrial North and the agricultural, slave-owning South was a watershed in American history. The innocent optimism of the young democratic nation gave way, after the war, to a period of exhaustion. American idealism remained but was rechanneled. Before the war, idealists championed human rights, especially the abolition of slavery; after the war, Americans increasingly idealized progress and the self-made man. This was the era of the millionaire manufacturer and the speculator, when Darwinian evolution and the “survival of the fittest” seemed to sanction the sometimes unethical methods of the successful business tycoon.

Business boomed after the war. War production had boosted industry in the North and given it prestige and political clout. It also gave industrial leaders valuable experience in the management of men and machines. The enormous natural resources — iron, coal, oil, gold, and silver — of the American land benefitted business. The new intercontinental rail system, inaugurated in 1869, and the transcontinental telegraph, which began operating in 1861, gave industry access to materials, markets, and communications. The constant influx of immigrants provided a seemingly endless supply of inexpensive labor as well. Over 23 million foreigners — German, Scandinavian, and Irish in the early years, and increasingly Central and Southern Europeans thereafter — flowed into the United States between 1860 and 1910. Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino contract laborers were imported by Hawaiian plantation owners, railroad companies, and other American business interests on the West Coast. In 1860, most Americans lived on farms or in small villages, but by 1919 half of the population was concentrated in about 12 cities. Problems of urbanization and industrialization appeared: poor and overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions, low pay (called “wage slavery”), difficult working conditions, and inadequate restraints on business. Labor unions grew, and strikes brought the plight of working people to national awareness. Farmers, too, saw themselves struggling against the “money interests” of the East, the so-called robber barons like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Their eastern banks tightly controlled mortgages and credit so vital to western development and agriculture, while railroad companies charged high prices to transport farm products to the cities. The farmer gradually became an object of ridicule, lampooned as an unsophisticated “hick” or “rube.” The ideal American of the post-Civil War period became the millionaire. In 1860, there were fewer than 100 millionaires; by 1875, there were more than 1,000. From 1860 to 1914, the United States was transformed from a small, young, agricultural ex-colony to a huge, modern, industrial nation. A debtor nation in 1860, by 1914 it had become the world’s wealthiest state, with a population that had more than doubled, rising from 31 million in 1860 to 76 million in 1900. By World War I, the United States had become a major world power. As industrialization grew, so did alienation. Characteristic Americaovels of the period Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Jack London’s Martin Eden, and later Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy depict the damage of economic forces and alienation on the weak or vulnerable individual. Survivors, like Twain’s Huck Finn, Humphrey Vanderveyden in London’s The Sea-Wolf, and Dreiser’s opportunistic Sister Carrie, endure through inner strength involving kindness, flexibility, and, above all, individuality.

SAMUEL CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN) (1835-1910)

Samuel Clemens, better known by his peame of Mark Twain, grew up in the Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Ernest Hemingway’s famous statement that all of American literature comes from one great book, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, indicates this author’s towering place in the tradition. Early 19th-century American writers tended to be too flowery, sentimental, or ostentatious — partially because they were still trying to prove that they could write as elegantly as the English. Twain’s style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm. For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not merely a literary technique: It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions. Thus it was profoundly liberating and potentially at odds with society. The most well-known example is Huck Finn, a poor boy who decides to follow the voice of his conscience and help a Negro slave escape to freedom, even though Huck thinks this means that he will be damned to hell for breaking the law. Twain’s masterpiece, which appeared in 1884, is set in the Mississippi River village of St. Petersburg. The son of an alcoholic bum, Huck has just been adopted by a respectable family when his father, in a drunken stupor, threatens to kill him. Fearing for his life, Huck escapes, feigning his own death. He is joined in his escape by another outcast, the slave Jim, whose owner, Miss Watson, is thinking of selling him down the river to the harsher slavery of the deep South. Huck and Jim float on a raft down the majestic Mississippi, but are sunk by a steamboat, separated, and later reunited. They go through many comical and dangerous shore adventures that show the variety, generosity, and sometimes cruel irrationality of society. In the end, it is discovered that Miss Watson had already freed Jim, and a respectable family is taking care of the wild boy Huck. But Huck grows impatient with civilized society and plans to escape to “the territories” — Indian lands. The ending gives the reader the counter-version of the classic American success myth: the open road leading to the pristine wilderness, away from the morally corrupting influences of “civilization.” James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, Walt Whitman’s hymns to the open road, William Faulkner’s The Bear, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road are other literary examples. Huckleberry Finn has inspired countless literary interpretations. Clearly, the novel is a story of death, rebirth, and initiation. The escaped slave, Jim, becomes a father figure for Huck; in deciding to save Jim, Huck grows morally beyond the bounds of his slave-owning society. It is Jim’s adventures that initiate Huck into the complexities of humaature and give him moral courage. The novel also dramatizes Twain’s ideal of the harmonious community: “What you want, above all things, on a raft is for everybody to be satisfied and feel right and kind toward the others.” Like Melville’s ship the Pequod, the raft sinks, and with it that special community. The pure, simple world of the raft is ultimately overwhelmed by progress — the steamboat — but the mythic image of the river remains, as vast and changing as life itself. The unstable relationship between reality and illusion is Twain’s characteristic theme, the basis of much of his humor. The magnificent yet deceptive, constantly changing river is also the main feature of his imaginative landscape. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain recalls his training as a young steamboat pilot when he writes: “I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief.” Twain’s moral sense as a writer echoes his pilot’s responsibility to steer the ship to safety. Samuel Clemens’s peame, “Mark Twain,” is the phrase Mississippi boatmen used to signify two fathoms (3.6 meters) of water, the depth needed for a boat’s safe passage. Twain’s serious purpose, combined with a rare genius for humor and style, keep his writing fresh and appealing.

FRONTIER HUMOR AND REALISM

Two major literary currents in 19th-century America merged in Mark Twain: popular frontier humor and local color, or “regionalism.” These related literary approaches began in the 1830s — and had even earlier roots in local oral traditions. In ragged frontier villages, on riverboats, in mining camps, and around cowboy campfires far from city amusements, storytelling flourished. Exaggeration, tall tales, incredible boasts, and comic workingmen heroes enlivened frontier literature. These humorous forms were found in many frontier regions — in the “old Southwest” (the present-day inland South and the lower Midwest), the mining frontier, and the Pacific Coast. Each region had its colorful characters around whom stories collected: Mike Fink, the Mississippi riverboat brawler; Casey Jones, the brave railroad engineer; John Henry, the steel-driving African-American; Paul Bunyan, the giant logger whose fame was helped along by advertising; westerners Kit Carson, the Indian fighter, and Davy Crockett, the scout. Their exploits were exaggerated and enhanced in ballads, newspapers, and magazines. Sometimes, as with Kit Carson and Davy Crockett, these stories were strung together into book form. Twain, Faulkner, and many other writers, particularly southerners, are indebted to frontier pre-Civil War humorists such as Johnson Hooper, George Washington Harris, Augustus Longstreet, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and Joseph Baldwin. From them and the American frontier folk came the wild proliferation of comical new American words: “absquatulate” (leave), “flabbergasted” (amazed), “rampagious” (unruly, rampaging). Local boasters, or “ring-tailed roarers,” who asserted they were half horse, half alligator, also underscored the boundless energy of the frontier. They drew strength from natural hazards that would terrify lesser men. “I’m a regular tornado,” one swelled, “tough as hickory and long-winded as a nor’wester. I can strike a blow like a falling tree, and every lick makes a gap in the crowd that lets in an acre of sunshine.”

LOCAL COLORISTS

Like frontier humor, local color writing has old roots but produced its best works long after the Civil War. Obviously, many pre-war writers, from Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne to John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, paint striking portraits of specific American regions. What sets the colorists apart is their self-conscious and exclusive interest in rendering a given location, and their scrupulously factual, realistic technique.

Bret Harte (1836-1902) is remembered as the author of adventurous stories such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” set along the western mining frontier. As the first great success in the local colorist school, Harte for a brief time was perhaps the best-known writer in America — such was the appeal of his romantic version of the gunslinging West. Outwardly realistic, he was one of the first to introduce low-life characters — cunning gamblers, gaudy prostitutes, and uncouth robbers — into serious literary works. He got away with this (as had Charles Dickens in England, who greatly admired Harte’s work) by showing in the end that these seeming derelicts really had hearts of gold. Several women writers are remembered for their fine depictions of New England: Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), and especially Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909). Jewett’s originality, exact observation of her Maine characters and setting, and sensitive style are best seen in her fine story “The White Heron” in Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Harriet Beecher Stowe’s local color works, especially The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), depicting humble Maine fishing communities, greatly influenced Jewett. Nineteenth-century women writers formed their owetworks of moral support and influence, as their letters show. Women made up the major audience for fiction, and many women wrote popular novels, poems, and humorous pieces. All regions of the country celebrated themselves in writing influenced by local color. Some of it included social protest, especially toward the end of the century, when social inequality and economic hardship were particularly pressing issues. Racial injustice and inequality between the sexes appear in the works of southern writers such as George Washington Cable (1844-1925) and Kate Chopin (1851-1904), whose powerful novels set in Cajun/French Louisiana transcend the local color label. Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880) treats racial injustice with great artistry; like Kate Chopin’s daring novel The Awakening (1899), about a woman’s doomed attempt to find her own identity through passion, it was ahead of its time. In The Awakening, a young married woman with attractive children and an indulgent and successful husband gives up family, money, respectability, and eventually her life in search of self-realization. Poetic evocations of ocean, birds (caged and freed), and music endow this short novel with unusual intensity and complexity. Often paired with The Awakening is the fine story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). Both works were forgotten for a time, but rediscovered by feminist literary critics late in the 20th century. In Gilman’s story, a condescending doctor drives his wife mad by confining her in a room to “cure” her of nervous exhaustion. The imprisoned wife projects her entrapment onto the wallpaper, in the design of which she sees imprisoned women creeping behind bars.

MIDWESTERN REALISM

For many years, the editor of the important Atlantic Monthly magazine, William Dean Howells (1837-1920), published realistic local color writing by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, and others. He was the champion of realism, and his novels, such as A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), carefully interweave social circumstances with the emotions of ordinary middle-class Americans. Love, ambition, idealism, and temptation motivate his characters; Howells was acutely aware of the moral corruption of business tycoons during the Gilded Age of the 1870s. Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham uses an ironic title to make this point. Silas Lapham became rich by cheating an old business partner; and his immoral act deeply disturbed his family, though for years Lapham could not see that he had acted improperly. In the end, Lapham is morally redeemed, choosing bankruptcy rather than unethical success. Silas Lapham is, like Huckleberry Finn, an unsuccess story: Lapham’s business fall is his moral rise. Toward the end of his life, Howells, like Twain, became increasingly active in political causes, defending the rights of labor union organizers and deploring American colonialism in the Philippines.

COSMOPOLITAN NOVELISTS

Henry James (1843-1916) Henry James once wrote that art, especially literary art, “makes life, makes interest, makes importance.” James’s fiction and criticism is the most highly conscious, sophisticated, and difficult of its era. With Twain, James is generally ranked as the greatest Americaovelist of the second half of the 19th century.

James is noted for his “international theme” — that is, the complex relationships betweeaïve Americans and cosmopolitan Europeans. What his biographer Leon Edel calls James’s first, or “international,” phase encompassed such works as Transatlantic Sketches (travel pieces, 1875), The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and a masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In The American, for example, Christopher Newman, a naïve but intelligent and idealistic self-made millionaire industrialist, goes to Europe seeking a bride. When her family rejects him because he lacks an aristocratic background, he has a chance to revenge himself; in deciding not to, he demonstrates his moral superiority. James’s second period was experimental. He exploited new subject matters — feminism and social reform in The Bostonians (1886) and political intrigue in The Princess Casamassima (1885). He also attempted to write for the theater, but failed embarrassingly when his play Guy Domville (1895) was booed on the first night. In his third, or “major,” phase James returned to international subjects, but treated them with increasing sophistication and psychological penetration. The complex and almost mythical The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) (which James felt was his best novel), and The Golden Bowl (1904) date from this major period. If the main theme of Twain’s work is appearance and reality, James’s constant concern is perception. In James, only self-awareness and clear perception of others yields wisdom and self-sacrificing love. As James develops, his novels become more psychological and less concerned with external events. In James’s later works, the most important events are all psychological — usually moments of intense illumination that show characters their previous blindness. For example, in The Ambassadors, the idealistic, aging Lambert Strether uncovers a secret love affair and, in doing so, discovers a new complexity to his inner life. His rigid, upright, morality is humanized and enlarged as he discovers a capacity to accept those who have sinned.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) Like James, Edith Wharton grew up partly in Europe and eventually made her home there. She was descended from a wealthy, established family in New York society and saw firsthand the decline of this cultivated group and, in her view, the rise of boorish, nouveau-riche business families. This social transformation is the background of many of her novels. Like James, Wharton contrasts Americans and Europeans. The core of her concern is the gulf separating social reality and the inner self. Often a sensitive character feels trapped by unfeeling characters or social forces. Edith Wharton had personally experienced such entrapment as a young writer suffering a long nervous breakdown partly due to the conflict in roles between writer and wife. Wharton’s best novels include The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), The Age of Innocence (1920), and the beautifully crafted novella Ethan Frome (1911).

NATURALISM AND MUCKRAKING

Wharton’s and James’s dissections of hidden sexual and financial motivations at work in society link them with writers who seem superficially quite different: Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. Like the cosmopolitaovelists, but much more explicitly, these naturalists used realism to relate the individual to society. Often they exposed social problems and were influenced by Darwinian thought and the related philosophical doctrine of determinism, which views individuals as the helpless pawns of economic and social forces beyond their control. Naturalism is essentially a literary expression of determinism. Associated with bleak, realistic depictions of lower-class life, determinism denies religion as a motivating force in the world and instead perceives the universe as a machine. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers had also imagined the world as a machine, but as a perfect one, invented by God and tending toward progress and human betterment. Naturalists imagined society, instead, as a blind machine, godless and out of control. The 19th-century American historian Henry Adams constructed an elaborate theory of history involving the idea of the dynamo, or machine force, and entropy, or decay of force. Instead of progress, Adams sees inevitable decline in human society.

Stephen Crane, the son of a clergyman, put the loss of God most succinctly: A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.” Like Romanticism, naturalism first appeared in Europe. It is usually traced to the works of Honoré? de Balzac in the 1840s and seen as a French literary movement associated with Gustave Flaubert, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Émile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant. It daringly opened up the seamy underside of society and such topics as divorce, sex, adultery, poverty, and crime. Naturalism flourished as Americans became urbanized and aware of the importance of large economic and social forces. By 1890, the frontier was declared officially closed. Most Americans resided in towns, and business dominated even remote farmsteads.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) Stephen Crane, born in New Jersey, had roots going back to Revolutionary War soldiers, clergymen, sheriffs, judges, and farmers who had lived a century earlier. Primarily a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays, Crane saw life at its rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His short stories — in particular, “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” — exemplified that literary form. His haunting Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, was published to great acclaim in 1895, but he barely had time to bask in the attention before he died, at 29, having neglected his health. He was virtually forgotten during the first two decades of the 20th century, but was resurrected through a laudatory biography by Thomas Beer in 1923. He has enjoyed continued success ever since — as a champion of the common man, a realist, and a symbolist. Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is one of the best, if not the earliest, naturalistic Americaovels. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensitive young girl whose uneducated, alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love and eager to escape her violent home life, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive, but soon commits suicide out of despair. Crane’s earthy subject matter and his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, earmark Maggie as a naturalist work.

Jack London (1876-1916) A poor, self-taught worker from California, the naturalist Jack London was catapulted from poverty to fame by his first collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf (1900), set largely in the Klondike region of Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. Other of his best-sellers, including The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904) made him the highest paid writer in the United States of his time. The autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909) depicts the inner stresses of the American dream as London experienced them during his meteoric rise from obscure poverty to wealth and fame. Eden, an impoverished but intelligent and hardworking sailor and laborer, is determined to become a writer. Eventually, his writing makes him rich and well-known, but Eden realizes that the woman he loves cares only for his money and fame. His despair over her inability to love causes him to lose faith in humaature. He also suffers from class alienation, for he no longer belongs to the working class, while he rejects the materialistic values of the wealthy whom he worked so hard to join. He sails for the South Pacific and commits suicide by jumping into the sea. Like many of the best novels of its time, Martin Eden is an unsuccess story. It looks ahead to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in its revelation of despair amid great wealth.

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) The 1925 work An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, like London’s Martin Eden, explores the dangers of the American dream. The novel relates, in great detail, the life of Clyde Griffiths, a boy of weak will and little self-awareness. He grows up in great poverty in a family of wandering evangelists, but dreams of wealth and the love of beautiful women. A rich uncle employs him in his factory. When his girlfriend Roberta becomes pregnant, she demands that he marry her. Meanwhile, Clyde has fallen in love with a wealthy society girl who represents success, money, and social acceptance. Clyde carefully plans to drown Roberta on a boat trip, but at the last minute he begins to change his mind; however, she accidentally falls out of the boat. Clyde, a good swimmer, does not save her, and she drowns. As Clyde is brought to justice, Dreiser replays his story in reverse, masterfully using the vantage points of prosecuting and defense attorneys to analyze each step and motive that led the mild-mannered Clyde, with a highly religious background and good family connections, to commit murder.

Despite his awkward style, Dreiser, in An American Tragedy, displays crushing authority. Its precise details build up an overwhelming sense of tragic inevitability. The novel is a scathing portrait of the American success myth gone sour, but it is also a universal story about the stresses of urbanization, modernization, and alienation. Within it roam the romantic and dangerous fantasies of the dispossessed. An American Tragedy is a reflection of the dissatisfaction, envy, and despair that afflicted many poor and working people in America’s competitive, success-driven society. As American industrial power soared, the glittering lives of the wealthy iewspapers and photographs sharply contrasted with the drab lives of ordinary farmers and city workers. The media fanned rising expectations and unreasonable desires. Such problems, common to modernizing nations, gave rise to muckraking journalism — penetrating investigative reporting that documented social problems and provided an important impetus to social reform. The great tradition of American investigative journalism had its beginning in this period, during which national magazines such as McClures and Collier’s published Ida M. Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (1904), and other hard-hitting exposés. Muckraking novels used eye-catching journalistic techniques to depict harsh working conditions and oppression. Populist Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) exposed big railroad companies, while socialist Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) painted the squalor of the Chicago meat-packing houses. Jack London’s dystopia, The Iron Heel (1908), anticipates George Orwell’s 1984 in predicting a class war and the takeover of the government. Another more artistic response was the realistic portrait, or group of portraits, of ordinary characters and their frustrated inner lives. The collection of stories Main-Travelled Roads (1891), by William Dean Howells’s protégé, Hamlin Garland (1860-1940), is a portrait gallery of ordinary people. It shockingly depicted the poverty of midwestern farmers who were demanding agricultural reforms. The title suggests the many trails westward that the hardy pioneers followed and the dusty main streets of the villages they settled.

Close to Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads is Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), begun in 1916. This is a loose collection of stories about residents of the fictitious town of Winesburg seen through the eyes of a naïve young newspaper reporter, George Willard, who eventually leaves to seek his fortune in the city. Like Main-Travelled Roads and other naturalistic works of the period, Winesburg, Ohio emphasizes the quiet poverty, loneliness, and despair in small-town America.

American literature of the 19th century. Theodore Dreiser American tragedy

Theodore Dreiser, 1933

Born

August 17, 1871 Terre Haute, Indiana

Died

December 28, 1945

Occupation

Americaaturalist author

Spouse

Sara White

Parents

Sarah and John Paul Dreiser

Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an Americaaturalist author known for dealing with the gritty reality of life. He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Sarah and John Paul Dreiser, a strict Catholic. John, his father, was a German immigrant and Sarah was from the Mennonite farming community near Dayton, Ohio; she was disowned for marrying John and converting to Catholicism. Theodore was the twelfth of thirteen children (the ninth of the ten surviving). The popular songwriter Paul Dresser (1859–1906) was his older brother. From 1889–1890, Theodore attended Indiana University before flunking out. Within several years, he was writing for the Chicago Globe newspaper and then the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. After proposing in 1893, he married Sara White on December 28, 1898. They ultimately separated in 1909, but were never formally divorced.

Dreiser in 1918

His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), tells the story of a woman who flees her country life for the city (Chicago, Illinois) and falls into a wayward life of sin. The publisher did little to promote the book, and it sold poorly. Dreiser took a job editing women’s magazines until he was forced to resign in 1910 because of an intraoffice romance. His second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was published the following year. Many of Dreiser’s subsequent novels dealt with social inequality.

His first commercial success was An American Tragedy (1925), which was made into a film in 1931 and again in 1951.

Other works include The “Genius,” and the Trilogy of Desire about Frank Cowperwood, a fictionalized version of Charles Yerkes: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (published posthumously in 1947).In 1935 the library trustees of Warsaw, Indiana ordered the burning of all the library’s works by Dreiser.

Dreiser’s style is marked by long sentences and intense attention to detail. Since his works deal with social status and the pursuit of material goods and pleasures, this level of realism and description services his theme; on the other hand, it can make many of his works, particularly Sister Carrie, difficult for some. It should be noted that Dreiser is not well-regarded for his style, but for the realism of his work, character development, and his points-of-view on American life. Still, he is known to have had an enormous influence on the generation that followed his. In his tribute “Dreiser” from Horses and Men (1923), Sherwood Anderson writes:

Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick some of his books to pieces, to laugh at him for so much of his heavy prose… The fellows of the ink-pots, the prose writers in America who follow Dreiser, will have much to do that he has never done. Their road is long but, because of him, those who follow will never have to face the road through the wilderness of Puritan denial, the road that Dreiser faced alone.

Humorist Corey Ford (writing as “John Riddell”) quipped that Dreiser had only one plot: Boy meets Girl = Tragedy. F. R. Leavis remarked that Dreiser wrote as if he did not have a native language.

Renowned mid-century literary critic Irving Howe spoke of Dreiser as “among the American giants, one of the very few American giants we have had.”

Politically, Dreiser was involved in several campaigns against social injustice. This included the lynching of Frank Little, one of the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the deportation of Emma Goldman, and the conviction of the trade union leader Tom Mooney.

Dreiser, a committed socialist, wrote several non-fiction books on political issues. This included Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), Tragic America (1931) and America is Worth Saving (1941). Theodore Dreiser joined the American Communist Party in August 1945; on December 28th he died of heart failure.

One famous quote: “All of us are more or less pawns. We’re moved about like chess pieces by circumstances over which we have no control”

An American Tragedy

An American Tragedy. Introduction

Theodore Dreiser’s massive novel An American Tragedy was published in December 1925 in two volumes. Coming in the middle of Dreiser’s long career, it was the first novel to earn him fame and wealth, though not the first to be controversial. An American Tragedy is a detailed portrayal of the dark side of the American Dream—the story of what can happen when an ordinary man’s desire for wealth and status overwhelms his moral sense. Dreiser built the novel around a real-life crime after spending years researching incidents in which men murdered women with whom they had been romantically involved but who had become inconvenient for one reason or another (often because of an unwanted pregnancy, as in the novel). Dreiser chose as his starting point the case of Chester Gillette, who drowned his pregnant girlfriend in a New York lake in 1906. Like the novel’s Clyde Griffiths, Chester Gillette was electrocuted for his crime. An American Tragedy is an Americaovel by Theodore Dreiser. Published in 1925, the book is the story of a young man, Clyde Griffiths, whose troubles with women and the law take him from his religious upbringing in Kansas City to the fictional town of Lycurgus, New York. Among Clyde’s love interests are the materialistic Hortense Briggs, the charming farmer’s daughter Roberta Alden, and the aristocratic Sondra Finchley. The book is naturalistic in style, containing subject matter such as religion, capital punishment and abortion. An American Tragedy has been adapted into opera, at the hands of composer Tobias Picker. It premiered at the Metropolitan Opera starring Nathan Gunn in New York on Dec. 2, 2005. The well-known film A Place in the Sun is also based on An American Tragedy. Dreiser strongly disapproved of a 1931 film version directed by Josef von Sternberg. Sergei Eisenstein prepared a screenplay in the late 1920s. Many critics and commentators have also compared elements of Woody Allen’s 2005 film, Match Point to the central plot of An American Tragedy. Dreiser based the book on the notorious 1906 criminal case, in which Chester Gillette was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend, Grace Brown, at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. The murder trial drew international attention when Brown’s love letters to Gillette were read in court. Theodore Dreiser saved newspaper clippings about the case for some 15 years before writing his novel. Clyde Griffiths was based on Chester Gillette, right down to the same initials.

Plot summary

Raised by poor and devoutly-religious parents, who force him to participate in their street missionary work, the ambitious but naïve Clyde is anxious to achieve better things. His troubles begin when he takes a job as a bell-boy at a local hotel. The boys he meets are much more sophisticated than he, and they introduce Clyde to the world of alcohol and prostitution. Clyde enjoys his new lifestyle and does everything in his power to win the affections of the flirtatious Hortense Briggs. But Clyde’s life is forever changed when a stolen car he is travelling in with friends kills a young child. Clyde flees Kansas City, and after a brief stay in Chicago, he reestablishes himself as a foreman at the collar factory of his wealthy long-lost uncle in Lycurgus, New York, who adopts Clyde after they suddenly meet through a stroke of fortune. Although Clyde vows not to consort with women in the way that caused his Kansas City downfall, he is swiftly attracted to Roberta Alden, a poor and very innocent farmgirl working under him — thus breaking the factory rules. While Clyde initially enjoys the secretive relationship and virtually coerces Roberta into sex, his ambition forces him to realize that he could never marry her. He dreams of the elegant Sondra Finchley, the daughter of a wealthy Lycurgus man and a family friend of his uncle’s. As developments between him and Sondra begin to look promising, Roberta discovers that she is pregnant. Having unsuccessfully attempted to procure an abortion for Roberta, who expects him to marry her, Clyde procrastinates while his relationship with Sondra continues to mature. When he realizes that he has a genuine chance to marry Sondra, Clyde hatches a plan to get rid of Roberta in a manner that seems accidental.

When he takes Roberta for a canoe ride on Big Bittern lake in upstate New York, Clyde lacks the nerve to murder her; however, Roberta accidentally falls out of the boat and drowns, Clyde being too cowardly, or hesitant, to save her; the narrative is deliberately unclear. The trail of circumstantial evidence points to murder, and the local authorities are only too eager to convict Clyde. Following a sensational trial before an unsympathetic audience, despite a vigorous defense by two lawyers hired by his uncle, Clyde is found guilty and sentenced to death. The jailhouse scenes and the correspondence between Clyde and his mother stand out as exemplars of pathos in modern literature.

In Popular Culture

The novel was the theme of a Old Time Radio comedy episode of the award-winning show, Our Miss Brooks. The radio programme aired on July 2, 1946, and was entitled, “American Tragedy.” The episode revolved around the characters misinterpreting the intentions of Philip Boyton (played by Jeff Chandler), paralleling them to the theme of “American Tragedy”. The programme was re-broadcast with some changes on September 19, 1948 and again on August 21, 1949 with the title of “Weekend at Crystal Lake.”

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Dreiser’s style is unconventional. If students have heard of him, they’ve heard that he’s a clumsy stylist. The instructor should explain that Dreiser was trained as a journalist whose main duty was to record the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a story. Graceful style was a small concern. In fact, some of Dreiser’s verbal clumsiness was more or less deliberate. His writing possesses its particular power, its ability to move the emotions, in part because of its bluntness, its lack of grace. Try to imagine “Typhoon” told by a facile stylist, for example, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It would lose much of its voltage.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Dreiser is best taught as a writer who held philosophically conflicting ideas in suspension simultaneously. His best writing springs from the tensions generated by these opposing ideas. On the one hand he was virtually a textbook naturalist; on the other, a mystic, romantic, and sentimental writer. He was also a left-leaning social activist, a stance which, strictly speaking, is incompatible with naturalistic beliefs.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

This story is written in Dreiser’s late style, a fragmented, free-association style that attempts to accomplish many of the same things that stream-of-consciousness writers like James Joyce and William Faulkner were trying to do during the 1920s. Dreiser may have known of Ulysses; Faulkner wasn’t really on the scene yet. Dreiser had been reading Freud and was much interested in the workings of the subconscious mind. One can teach this story as an example of early stream-of-consciousness writing. An American Tragedy is widely considered Dreiser’s best novel and an important work of Americaaturalism. Naturalism, which began in Europe and flowered in America, is a literary style that explores the premise that individuals’ fates are determined by a combination of hereditary and environmental constraints that leave no room for free will or true individual choice. Some scholars and critics consider An American Tragedy one of the greatest American novels of any style or period.

The American Dream as Illusion

The idea of the American Dream is that all Americans have the opportunity to improve themselves economically and socially. In America, it is said, a person’s circumstances at birth place no limit on his or her potential; people can make of themselves whatever they choose and rise as high as they are willing to climb. If Dreiser’s message in An American Tragedy can be summed up in a sentence, it is: the American Dream is a lie. Dreiser creates a microcosm of America by introducing characters that represent every stratum of society and every… The novel’s main character, Clyde is driven all his life in pursuit of his idea of the American dream. He is materialistic and pleasure-seeking, and he lacks any strong moral center. He is willing to lie and to indulge in unethical and illegal behavior in pursuit of his goals, and he repeatedly runs from difficulties, especially those he creates for himself. For Clyde, there is no clear line between reality and fantasy, right and wrong. To escape his sordid life, he daydreams of wealth and luxury. To live with his acts of cowardice, he rationalizes them.

Overview

Note on the Text

An American Tragedy is based on an incident that occurred in upstate New York in 1906, when a factory worker named Chester Gillette murdered a young woman on Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks. The woman, Grace Brown, had been pregnant with Gillette’s child. In a well-publicized trial, Gillette was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. His conviction was upheld on appeal. After Governor Charles Hughes refused to grant a stay of execution, Gillette was put to death on March 31, 1908. He is mentioned in passing in Dreiser’s essay “Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse,” written sometime around 1917 and included in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1920).

In the summer of 1920, while living in Los Angeles, Dreiser began writing An American Tragedy. He worked steadily through the fall and felt confident enough about the novel’s progress in December 1920 to tell his publisher, Horace Liveright, that he hoped to finish it by the following spring. But in June 1921 he stopped work on An American Tragedy and put it aside for two years. His early version, comprising 21 chapters, exists in two forms in the Theodore Dreiser Papers at the University of Pennsylvania Library: a 604-page manuscript and a 188-page carbon typescript typed by Estelle Kubitz. Dreiser revised the manuscript draft for the typescript, which included some changes suggested by Kubitz. Dreiser resumed working on An American Tragedy in 1923. Now living in New York City, he researched the Gillette case extensively. In late June and early July 1923 he and his companion Helen Richardson traveled to upstate New York and visited key sites pertaining to the case, such as Big Moose Lake and the courthouse where the trial had taken place. Soon afterward he began rewriting Book One of An American Tragedy from the beginning, salvaging little from the 1920-version. He completed a manuscript draft of Book One in January 1924. Sally Kusell began typing this draft in the late summer or early fall of 1923; the following March, Louise Campbell began typing sections of the manuscript as well. Boni & Liveright received a complete typescript of Book One in June 1924 . Although this document does not survive, a final revised typescript, presently in the Dreiser Papers at the University of Pennsylvania, includes revisions by Dreiser and Kusell. The other surviving documents for Book One—the typesetter’s copy, the author’s galleys, and the revised page proofs—also contain alterations by the author and his typists. Boni & Liveright editor Thomas R. Smith and his assistant Emanuel Komroff made extensive changes of their own, as well as suggesting further revisions and cuts. Dreiser revised the galley proofs and the page proofs of Book One while working on Book Two and Book Three of An American Tragedy; the novel assumed its final form in the summer or early fall of 1925 . Dreiser began Book Two in January 1924 and finished a draft either in December 1924 or in January 1925. Kusell and Campbell continued to work as his typists, a role that also included editorial duties. Receiving the typescript in sections, Boni & Liveright were in possession of a complete draft of Book Two by March 1925. As with Book One, Liveright’s editors Smith and Komroff revised passages and recommended changes that might be made for publication. The changes in the first set of page proofs were extensive enough to require the printing of a second set, which in turn were further revised by Dreiser. The revision of Book Two was completed in the fall of 1925 .

Although Dreiser began writing Book Three with renewed vigor at the beginning of 1925, the book’s progress was slowed by an attack of bronchitis in March and his continued work on Book One and Book Two. Dreiser’s manuscript and typescript drafts were edited, cut, and retyped by Sally Kusell (until the late summer or early fall of 1925, when her relations with Dreiser were too strained for her to continue) and by Louise Campbell; Helen Richardson served as one of Dreiser’s typists as well for Book Three, although it appears that she did not edit his work. By mid-August, Boni & Liveright, hoping to bring out An American Tragedy in October, was pressuring Dreiser to finish the novel. After submitting his complete typescript of Book Three at the end of September or in early October 1925, he made further revisions as it was prepared for publication. His final alterations were made on the page proofs on November 25, 1925. A few days later he toured Sing Sing prison with the intention of making additional changes to the book’s final three chapters; after the visit, however, he decided that the novel was finished. An American Tragedy was published in a two-volume set by Boni & Liveright on December 17, 1925. Dreiser made no changes in subsequent printings of the novel. The present volume prints the text of the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of An American Tragedy. This volume presents the text of the original printing chosen for inclusion here, but it does not attempt to reproduce features of its typographic design, such as display capitalization of chapter openings. The text is presented without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are often expressive features and are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular.

A tremendous bestseller when it was first published in 1925, An American Tragedy is the culmination of Theodore Dreiser’s elementally powerful fictional art. Taking as his point of departure a notorious murder case of 1906—one among the many that he studied in preparation for the novel—Dreiser immersed himself in the social background of the crime to produce a book that is both a remarkable work of reportage, a monumental study of character, and a stunning jeremiad against the delusions and inequities of American society. Few novels have undertaken to track so relentlessly the process by which an ordinary young man becomes capable of committing a ruthless murder, and the further process by which social and political forces come into play after his arrest. In Clyde Griffiths, the impoverished, restless offspring of a family of street preachers, Dreiser created an unforgettable portrait of a man whose social insecurities and naive dreams of self-betterment conspire to pull him toward an act of unforgivable violence. The murder that he commits on a quiet lake in the Adirondacks is an extended scene of overwhelming impact, and it is followed by equally gripping episodes of his arrest and trial. Throughout, Dreiser elevates the most mundane aspects of what he observes into emotionally charged, often harrowing symbols. Around Clyde, Dreiser builds an extraordinarily detailed portrait of early twentieth-century America, its religious and sexual hypocrisies, its economic pressures, its political corruption and journalistic exploitation. The sheer prophetic amplitude of his bitter truth-telling, in idiosyncratic prose of uncanny expressiveness, continues to mark Dreiser as a crucially important American writer. An American Tragedy, the great achievement of his later years, is a work of mythic force, at once brutal and heartbreaking. American author, outstanding representative of naturalism, whose novels depict real-life subjects in a harsh light. Dreiser’s novels were held to be amoral, and he battled throughout his career against censorship and popular taste. This started with SISTER CARRIE (1900). It was not until 1981 that the work was published in its original form. Dreiser’s principal concern was with the conflict between humaeeds and the demands of society for material success.

As a novelist Dreiser made his debut with Sister Carrie, a powerful account of a young working girl’s rise to success and her slow decline. “She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterized her thoughts it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in the throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.” (from the 1981 edition) The president of the publishing company, Frank Doubleday, disapproved of the work – Dreiser illuminated the flaws of his characters but did not judge them and allowed vice to be rewarded instead of punished. No attempt was made to promote the book. Sister Carrie was reissued in 1907 and it became one of the most famous novels in literary history. Among its admirers was H.L. Mencken, an aspiring journalist, whom Dreiser had hired as a ghost-writer in his paper. William Wyler’s film version, starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones, was made at the height of the Cold War and McCarthy era. Paramount executives delayed the releasing of the film – they thought the picture was not good for America and it was a flop. “It was a depressing story”, said Wyler, “and it might not have been a success anyway.” The 500 sold copies of his first novel and family troubles drove Dreiser to the verge of suicide. He worked at a variety of literary jobs, and as an editor- in- chief of three women’s magazines until 1910, when he was forced to resign, because of an office love affair. In 1911 JENNIE GERHARDT, Dreiser’s second novel, appeared. In the story a young woman, Jennie, is seduced by a senator. She bears a child out of wedlock but sacrifices her own interests to avoid harming her lover’s career. A passage in which Jennie’s lover Lester Kane, the son of a wealthy family, tells her about contraceptives, was removed by Ripley Hitchcock, the editor at Harper & Brothers. Jennie Gerhardt was followed by novels based on the life of the American transportation magnate Charles T. Jerkes, THE FINANCIER (1912), and THE TITAN (1914), which show the influence of the evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer and Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch. Last volume of the trilogy, THE STOIC, was finished in 1945. Dreiser’s semi-autobiographical novel THE ‘GENIUS’ (1915) was censured by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The book remained off the market until Liveright reissued it five years later. Dreiser’s commercially most successful novel was AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1925), which was adapted for screen for thefirst time in 1931, directed by Josef von Sternberg. Dreiser had objected strongly to the version because it portrayed his youthful killer as a sex-starved idle loafer. The second time was in 1951 under the title A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. During the filming the stars became attached to one another, which is reflected in the tenderness of their performance. The director George Stevens won an Academy Award, as did the writers Michael Wilson and Harry Brown for Best Screenplay. However, Robert Hatch in the New Republic (September 10,1951) dismissed the film. “Unfortunately, the power and bite of the book have been lost in the polite competence of the screen. These are such nice, such obviously successful people, they must be playing characters… there doesn’t seem much use in dragging Dreiser’s classic off the shelf just to dress it in this elegant, ambivalent production…” The book made Dreiser the champion of social reformers, but his later works did not attain similar notice. Also as a short story writer Dreiser never gained similar fame as a novelist. ‘The Last Phoebe’ (1914) was rejected by more than ten magazines, and ‘Free’ (1918) was criticized for promoting divorce.

Much of Dreiser’s works evolved from his own experiences of poverty. Among his rare excursions into the realm of fantasy is the ghost story ‘The Hand’ (1920). It is a tale of murder and the haunting of the killer, but again behind the nightmare of the protagonist are the familiar themes of Dreiser’s novels – fear of losing ones social position, feelings of moral guilt arising during the unrestrained struggle for success. Dreiser died in Hollywood, California, on December 28, 1945. In the last months of his life, Dreiser joined the Communist Party. In the 1920’s Dreiser had travelled in Russia and depicted his experiences in DREISER LOOKS AT RUSSIA (1928). During the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, Dreiser was considered a security risk and the F.B.I. had a dossier on him. Like many intellectuals in the 1930s (Hemingway, John Dos Passos, André Malraux, C. Day Lewis etc.), Dreiser had traveled to Spain during the civil war in support of the socialist government. Only a small number of writers supported Franco – George Santayana and Ezra Pound were the most famous. “He had an enormous influence on American literature during the first quarter of the century – and for a time he was American literature, the only writer worth talking about in the same breath with the European masters. Out of his passions, contradictions, and sufferings, he wrenched the art that was his salvation from the hungers and depressions that racked him. It was no wonder that he elevated the creative principle to a godhead and encouraged by word and example truthful expression in others.” (from Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey 1908-1945 by Richard Lingeman, 1991)

Questions for Reading and Discussion/ Approaches to Writing

Ask students to reflect on the following before class: guilt and innocence; “peer pressure”; the narrative voice- is it slanted or objective?

Are the characters in control of their destinies?

A good short theme can be developed on the last lines of the story. How does it resonate back through the entire narrative?

Theodore Dreiser novelist who was the outstanding American practitioner of naturalism. He was the leading figure in a national literary movement that replaced the observance of Victoriaotions of propriety with the unflinching presentation of real-life subject matter. Among other themes, his novels explore the new social problems… Selected works:

SISTER CARRIE, 1900 – film 1952, dir. by William Wyler, starring Laurence Olivier, Jennifer Jones.

JENNIE GERHARDT, 1911 – film 1933, dir. by Marion Gering, starring Sylvia Sidney, Donald Cook, Mary Astor

THE FINANCIER, 1912

THE TITAN, 1914

THE “GENIUS”, 1915

A HOSIER HOLIDAY, 1916

PLAYS OF THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL, 1916

FREE AND OTHER STORIES, 1918

THE HAND OF THE POTTER, 1918

TWELVE MEN, 1919

HEY-RUB-A-DUB-DUB, 1920

A BOOK ABOUT MYSELF, 1922

THE COLOUR OF A GREAT CITY, 1923

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, 1925 – film in 1931, directed by Josef von Sternberg, starring Phillips Holmes and Sylvi Sidney. – A Place in the Sun, 1951, dir. by George Stevens, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor

MOODS, CADENCED AND DECLAIMED, 1926

CHAINS, 1927

DREISER LOOKS AT RUSSIA, 1928

A GALLERY OF WOMEN, 1929

EPITAPH, 1929

MY CITY, 1929

TRAGIC AMERICA, 1931

DAWN, 1931

LIVING THOUGHTS OF THOREAU, 1939

AMERICA IS WORTH SAVING, 1941

THE BULWARK, 1946

THE STOIC, 1947