Theodore Dreiser

The Financier (1912) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. The first installment of Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire, The Financier has endured as a classic of naturalist fiction and remains a powerful example of social critique over a century after its publication. Followed by The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947), The Financier captures the greed at the heart of the Gilded Age, a time when tycoons rose with total impunity to take over swaths of American industry....

Jennie Gerhardt (1911) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. Controversial for its honest depiction of work, desire, and urban life, Jennie Gerhardt has endured as a classic of naturalist fiction and remains a powerful example of social critique over a century after its publication. Originally titled The Transgressor, the novel was shelved by Dreiser following a nervous breakdown in 1903. Controversial upon publication, Jennie Gerhardt has been largely...

Although world-famous for his novels Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, Theodore Dreiser was also highly accomplished in journalism, autobiography, and travel writing. In 1919, having recently accepted the publishing contract of a new publisher, Dreiser proposed to publish a "book of characters" that would collect twelve biographical sketches of individuals who were major influences on Dreiser, both as a man and as a writer. The resulting narratives...

Alone in the city, a young woman meets a man who promises to make her dreams come true. Eighteen-year-old Carrie is drawn to the glamour, wealth, and excitement of Chicago. But to be part of this glittering world, she will need much more money than she can even imagine. The only jobs she can find offer harsh conditions and little pay. Finally, inexperienced and desperate, she allows the smooth-talking salesman Charles Drouet to buy her meals and pretty...

"Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement," this chronicle of the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex spans four generations, focusing chiefly on the relationship between Ernest and his father, Theobald. Written in the wake of Darwin's Origin of Species, it reflects the dawning consciousness of heredity and environment as determinants of character. Along the way, it offers a powerfully satirical indictment of Victorian...

Based on the Theodore Dreiser novel that publishers deemed "too immoral," William Wyler's Carrie is a power-house of human passions transformed into soul-withering frailties. As Carrie, the smalltown girl come to Chicago, Jennifer Jones "seems to have stepped out of the pages of the book" (Time). And Laurence Olivier gives one of his finest portrayals as love-doomed Hurstwood. "Olivier has always given credit to Wyler for teaching him how to act in...