American Literature

030533/4/5, 21030533/4/5, 21st st Nov. 2006Nov. 2006

The American Realism(IV)

(1865 - 1918)

Lecture Nine

Theodore Dreiser ( 1871 – 1945)

I. About the author:1) Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1871. The

ninth child of German immigrants, he experienced considerable poverty while a child and at the age of fifteen was forced to leave home in search of work.

2) After briefly attending Indiana University for one year (1889-90), he found work as a reporter on several newspapers. Later he moved to New York where he attempted to establish himself as a novelist.

3) After his first novel Sister Carrie was published in 1900 with the help of Frank Norris, Dreiser continued to work as a journalist and as well as writing for mainstream newspapers. His second novel Jennie Gerhardt was not published until 1911. This was followed by two novels The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914). The Genius was published in 1915 but it was another ten years before Dreiser greatest novel, An American Tragedy (1925) appeared, which brought him a degree of critical and commercial success he had never before attained.

4) As a socialist, Dreiser was invited to be present at the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution in Moscow in 1927. After returning to America in early 1928, he 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 just before he died in 1945.

5) Though his visit to the Soviet Union had left him skeptical about communism, the Great Depression (from 1929)caused him to reconsider his opposition. His autobiographical Dawn (1931) is one of the most candid self-revelations by any major writer.

II. Works by Dreiser:1) Sister Carrie （ 1900 ） , the story of a kept woman whose

behavior goes unpunished.

2) Jennie Gerhardt （ 1911 ）

3) His Cowperwood trilogy based on the life of the transportation magnate Charles T. Yerkes.

The Financier （ 1912 ） The Titan （ 1914 ） The Stoic （ posthumously 1947 ）

4) The 'Genius' (1915), a sprawling semi-autobiographical chronicle of Dreiser's numerous love affairs, was censured by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Its sequel, The Bulwark, appeared posthumously in 1946.

5) An American Tragedy （ 1925 ）

III. His masterpiece: An American Tragedy （ 1925 ） The Story: 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. Mean while, 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.

The relevant evaluation:1) This novel explores the dangers of the American dream and

displays crushing authority. Its precise details build up an overwhelming sense of tragic inevitability.

2) It 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.

3) 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 sharply contrasted with the drab lives of ordinary farmers and city workers. The media fanned rising expectations and unreasonable desires.

IV. Evaluation on him:1) Dreiser has been a controversial figure in American literary

history. His works are powerful in their portrayal of the changing American life, but his style is considered crude. He showed a new way of presenting reality and inspired the writers of the 1920s with courage and insight. It is in Dreiser’s works that American naturalism is said to have come of age.

2) He embraced social Darwinism. He learned to regard man as merely an animal driven by greed and lust in a struggle for existence in which only the fittest, the most ruthless, survive. Human tragedy comes as a result of the collision between man’s biological needs and society’s ruthless manipulation.

3) It is Dreiser’s announced intention to report the coarse and the vulgar and the cruel and the terrible in life in defiance of the genteel and evasive current literature with which he had absolutely no patience and sympathy.

4) Dreiser’s writings reveal a tremendous vital lust for life with a conviction that man is the end and measure of all things in a world which is devoid of purpose and standards.

5) Although Dreiser’s novels are formless at times and awkwardly written and his characterization is found deficient and his prose pedestrian and dull, yet his very energy proves to be more than a compensation.

6) He is good at employing the journalistic method of reiteration to burn a central impression into the reader’s mind. His interest in painting is reflected in his taste for word-pictures, sharp contrast, truth in color, and movement in outline.

VII. The Chicago School of poets

1. The concept:1) Three Midwestern poets who grew up in Illinois and

shared the midwestern concern with ordinary people are Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters. Their poetry often concerns obscure individuals; they developed techniques——realism, dramatic renderings —— that reached out to a larger readership.

2) They are part of Midwestern, or Chicago, School that arose before World War I to challenge the East Coast literary establishment.

3) The “Chicago Renaissance” was a watershed in American culture; it demonstrated that America’s interior had matured.

Carl Sandburg (1878 - 1967)

I. About the author:1) Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on January 6,

1878, as the son of poor Swedish immigrant parents. The Sandburgs were very poor; Carl left school at the age of thirteen to work odd jobs, from laying bricks to dishwashing, to help support his family.

2) At seventeen, he traveled west to Kansas as a hobo. He then served eight months in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American war but saw no combat. Upon his return he entered Lombard college in Galesburg, studying the classics. During these years he started to write poetry and published his first book In Reckless Ecstasy (1904).

3) After college without degree, from 1902 to 1912 he ever did different kinds of jobs, as an advertising writer, journalist, traveler, labor organizer, secretary, editor and so on, and married a schoolteacher in 1908.

4) Then he moved to Chicago, where Carl became an editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News. It was during this period that Sandburg was recognized as a member of the Chicago literary renaissance.

5) He established his reputation with Chicago Poems (1916), and then Cornhuskers (1918). Soon after the publication of these volumes Sandburg wrote Smoke and Steel (1920), his first prolonged attempt to find beauty in modern industrialism. With these three volumes, Sandburg became known for his free verse poems celebrating industrial and agricultural America, American geography and landscape, and the American common people in Whitmanesque style.

6) From the twenties, for thirty years he sought out and collected material, and gradually began the writing of the six-volume definitive biography of Abraham Lincoln.

7) The twenties also saw Sandburg's collections of American folklore, the ballads, and the brief tours across America which Sandburg took each year, playing his banjo or guitar, singing folk-songs, and reciting poems.

8) In the 1930s, Sandburg continued his celebration of America with Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow (1932), The People, Yes (1936), and the second part of his Lincoln biography, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

9) He received a second Pulitzer Prize for his Complete Poems in 1950. His final volumes of verse were Harvest Poems, 1910-1960 (1960) and Honey and Salt (1963). Carl Sandburg died in 1967.

II. His masterpiece: Chicago (1914) A fine example of his themes and his Whitmanesque style

Hog Butcher for the World

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat

Player with Railroads and the

Nation’s Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders…

II. Evaluation on him: Poet, historian, biographer, novelist, musician, essayist,

Sandburg was all of these and more. A journalist by profession, he wrote a massive biography of Abraham Lincoln that is one of the classic works of the 20th century.

To many, he was a latter-day Walt Whitman, writing expansive, evocative urban and patriotic poems and simple, childlike rhymes and ballads.

Carl Sandburg spent a lifetime exploring what it meant to be an American and asked the eternal questions, "Who am I, where am I going and where have I been?"He did this through poetry, song, lectures, writing and lasting friendships with kindred spirits.

Vachel Lindsay (1879 - 1934)

I. About the author: http://www.poemhunter.com/vachel-lindsay/biography/poet-6634/

Lindsay's life was dedicated to the arts and was consumed, in various ways, by travel. As a young man he studied art in Chicago and New York, and when later he turned to poetry as a career, he continued his dual commitment to drawing and poetry by illustrating many of his books.

With his family Vachel Lindsay was also able to travel in Europe and in China. In the summers of 1906, 1908, and 1912, Lindsay took walking tours from Florida to Kentucky, from New York City to Ohio, and from Illinois to New Mexico. On these tours he developed his own "rules of the road," stipulating chiefly that he barter for room and board by offering an evening's entertainment--reading his own poetry--or a half day's work the next morning.

After he became famous as a poet in 1914, much the rest of his life was spent traveling across the United States earning the greater part of his income by recitations of his poetry.

On 1931 December 5 Lindsay commited suicide, drinking a bottle of Lysol.

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, 1879–1931, American poet, b. Springfield, Ill., studied at Hiram College, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the New York School of Art. Lindsay made tours selling his poems and drawings, living as a modern-day troubadour. He was particularly effective when reading his own poems. His poetry at its best is virile and strong. It has a fine spoken music, often enhanced by jazz rhythms.

Volumes of his poetry include General William Booth Enters into Heaven (1913), The Congo (1914), The Chinese Nightingale (1917), and Collected Poems (1938). Lindsay was plagued by poverty and illness in his later years, and the quality of his poetry declined.

VIII. The rise of black American literature

The literary achievement of African-Americans was one of the most striking literary developments of the post-Civil War era. The roots of black American writing took hold, notably in the forms of autobiography, protest literature, sermons, poetry, and song. For example:

Booker T. Washington’s fine and simple autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901) recounts his successful struggle to better himself.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s landmark book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) helped black intellectuals rediscover their rich folk literature and music.

James Weldon Johnson explored the complex issue of race in his fictional Autobiography of an Ex- Colored Man (1912), about a mixed-race man who "passes" (is accepted) for white. The book effectively conveys the black American's concern with issues of identity in America.