Biography

Early life 

  Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana to Sarah Maria and John Paul Dreiser. He was the ninth of ten surviving children in a family whose perennial poverty forced frequent moves between small Indiana towns and Chicago in search of a lower cost of living. His father a German immigrant, his mother’s gentle and compassionate outlook sprang from her Czech Mennonite background. His childhood was a hard one, and he knew poverty and want. At the age of 16 Theodore had to leave school and support himself by doing odd jobs. He worked as a waiter, a dish-washer, a rent-collector and a laundry-worker. In 1988 he entered the university, but after a year he had to leave the university because of money difficulties.

Start of writing career

  He began a career as a newspaper reporter in Chicago in 1892 and worked his way to the East Coast. While writing for a Pittsburgh newspaper in 1894, he read works by the scientists T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall and adopted the speculations of the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Through these readings and his own experience, Dreiser came to believe that human beings are helpless in the grip of instincts and social forces beyond their control, and he judged human society as an unequal contest between the strong and the weak. In 1894 Dreiser arrived in New York City, where he worked for several newspapers and contributed to magazines.

  Dreiser often was forced to battle against censorship because his depiction of some aspects of life, such as sexual promiscuity, offended authorities and challenged popular standards of acceptable opinion.

  Dreiser died on December 28, 1945, in Hollywood, California at the age of 74.