During 1899, the Dreisers stayed with Arthur Henry and his wife Maude Wood Henry at the House of Four Pillars, an 1830s Greek Revivalhouse in Maumee, Ohio. There Dreiser began work on his first novel Sister Carrie, published in 1900. Unknown to Maude, Henry sold a half-interest in the house to Dreiser to finance a move to New York without her.
In Sister Carrie, Dreiser portrayed a changing society, writing about a young woman who flees rural life for the city (Chicago) and struggles with poverty, complex relationships with men, and prostitution. It sold poorly and was considered controversial because of moral objections to his featuring a country girl who pursues her dreams of fame and fortune through relationships with men. The book has acquired a considerable reputation. It has been called the "greatest of all American urban novels."
In response to witnessing a lynching in 1893, Dreiser wrote the short story "Nigger Jeff" (1901), which was published in Ainslee's Magazine. This period is considered the nadir of American race relations, with a high rate of lynchings in Southern states, which from 1890 to 1910 also disfranchised most black citizens from voting, legally enforced white supremacy and Jim Crow, and suppressed black people in second-class status for decades.
His second novel Jennie Gerhardt was published in 1911. His featuring young women as protagonists dramatized the social changes of urbanization, as young people moved from rural villages to cities.
Dreiser's first commercial success was An American Tragedy, published in 1925. From 1892, when Dreiser began work as a newspaperman, he had begun to observe a certain type of crime in the United States that proved very common.
No comments:
Post a Comment