The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser

About this book

When Theodore Dreiser first published Sister Carrie in 1900 it was suppressed for its seamy plot colloquial language and immoralityfor as one reviewer put it its depiction of "the godless side of American life." It was a side of life experienced firsthand by Dreiser whose own circumstances often paralleled those of his characters in the turbulent turn-of-the-century era of immigrants black lynchings ruthless industrialists violent labor movements and the New Woman. This masterful critical biography the first on Dreiser in more than half a century is the only study to fully weave Dreisers literary achievement into the context of his life. Jerome Loving gives us a Dreiser for a new generation in a brilliant evocation of a writer who boldly swept away Victorian timidity to open the twentieth century in American literature. Dreiser was a controversial figure in his time not only because of his literary efforts which included publication of the brutal and heartbreaking An American Tragedy in 1925 but also because of his personal life which featured numerous sexual liaisons included membership in the communist party merited a 180-page FBI file and ended in Hollywood. The Last Titan paints a full portrait of the mature Dreiser between the two world warsthrough the roaring twenties the stock market crash and the Depressionand describes his contact with important figures from Emma Goldman and H.L. Mencken to two presidents Roosevelt. Tracing Dreisers literary roots in Hawthorne Emerson Thoreau and especially Whitman Loving has written what will surely become the standard biography of one of Americas best novelists.