Theodore Dreiser
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This novel about the effects of America's repressive moral climate was controversial in its day, and its availability to the public was delayed 12 years because of the "immorality" in Dreiser's sordid, realistic portrayal of the downfall of an innocent young woman who leaves her country town for the big city.
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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....
3) The Titan
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The Titan (1914) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. The second 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. Preceded by The Financier (1914) and followed by The Stoic (1947), The Titan captures the greed at the heart of the Gilded Age, a time when tycoons rose with total impunity to take over swaths of American...
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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...
5) The "Genius"
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The "Genius" (1915) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. Based partly on his own experience as an artist from the Midwest, The "Genius" examines the nature of talent, the difficulty of desire, and the meaning of faith itself. Although he had high hopes for the novel, reviews were mixed, and sales suffered due to charges of obscenity. Some critics, however, praised Dreiser's openness on sex and desire, opposing the censorship targeting the author's work....
6) Twelve Men
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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...
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This novel tracks the process by which an ordinary young man is capable of committing a ruthless murder, and the further process by which social and political forces come into play after his arrest. In Clyde Griffiths, the impoverished, restless offspring of a family of street preachers, we see a portrait of a man whose circumstances and dreams of self-betterment conspire to pull him toward an act of unforgivable violence.
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"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...
10) Carrie
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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...
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Previously filmed in 1931 under its original title, Theodore Dreiser's bulky but brilliant novel An American Tragedy was remade in 1951 by George Stevens as A PLACE IN THE SUN. Montgomery Clift stars as George Eastman, a handsome and charming but basically aimless young man who goes to work in a factory run by a distant, wealthy relative. Feeling lonely one evening, he has a brief rendezvous with assembly-line worker Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters),...