Theodore Dreiser Books In Order

Trilogy of Desire Books In Order

  1. The Financier (1912)
  2. The Titan (1914)
  3. The Stoic (1947)

Novels

  1. Sister Carrie (1904)
  2. Jennie Gerhardt (1911)
  3. The Genius (1915)
  4. An American Tragedy (1925)
  5. The Bulwark (1946)

Collections

  1. Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural (1916)

Non fiction

  1. Dawn (1931)

Trilogy of Desire Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Theodore Dreiser Books Overview

The Financier

First published in 1912, Theodore Dreiser’s third novel, The Financier, captures the ruthlessness and sparkle of the Gilded Age alongside the charismatic amorality of the power brokers and bankers of the mid-nineteenth century. This volume is the first modern edition of The Financier to draw on the uncorrected page proofs of the original 1912 version, which established Dreiser as a master of the American business novel. The novel was the first volume of Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire, also known as the Cowperwood Trilogy, which includes The Titan 1914 and The Stoic 1947.

Dreiser laboriously researched the business practices and personal exploits of real-life robber baron Charles Yerkes to narrate Frank Algernon Cowperwood’s early career in The Financier, which explores the unscrupulous world of finance from the Civil War through the panic incited by the 1871 Chicago fire. In 1927, the monumental novel reappeared in a radically revised version for which Dreiser, notorious for lengthy novels, agreed to cut more than two hundred and seventy pages. This revised version became the most familiar, reprinted by publishers and studied by scholars for decades.

For this new edition, Roark Mulligan meticulously reviewed earlier versions of the novel and its publication history, including the last-minute removal of paragraphs, pages, and even whole chapters from the 1912 edition, cuts based mainly on the advice of H. L. Mencken. The restored text better matches Dreiser’s original vision for the work. More than three hundred additional pages not available to modern readers–including those cut from the 1927 edition and more than seventy hastily removed from the manuscript just days before publication in 1912–more effectively establish characterization and motivation. Restored passages dedicated to the internal thoughts of major and minor characters bring a softer dimension to a novel primarily celebrated for its realistic attention to the cold external world of finance.

Mulligan’s historical commentary reveals new insights into Dreiser’s creative practices and how his business knowledge shaped The Financier. This supplemental material considers the novel’s place within the tradition of American business novels and its reflections on the scandalous business practices of the robber baron era.

The Titan

Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser 1871 1945 was an American author of the naturalist school, known for dealing with the gritty reality of life. His first novel, Sister Carrie 1900, tells the story of a woman who flees her country life for the city Chicago and falls into a wayward life. His second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was published the following year. Many of his subsequent novels dealt with social inequality. Though primarily known as a novelist, he published his first collection of short stories, Free and Other Stories in 1918. The collection contained 9 stories. His first commercial success was An American Tragedy 1925, which was made into a film in 1931 and again in 1951. He, a committed socialist, wrote several non fiction books on political issues. These included Dreiser Looks at Russia 1928, the result of his 1927 trip to the Soviet Union, Tragic America 1931 and America is Worth Saving 1941. His other works include The Financier 1912, The Titan 1914 and Twelve Men 1919.

Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today’s top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader’s viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences biographical, historical, and literary to enrich each reader’s understanding of these enduring works.

When small town Carrie Meeber arrives in 1890s Chicago, she cannot know what awaits. Callow, beautiful, and alone, she experiences the bitterness of temptation and hardship even as she sets her sights on a better life. Drawn by the seductive desire to rise above her social class, Carrie aspires to the top of the acting profession in New York, while the man who has become obsessed with her gambles everything for her sake and draws near the brink of destruction.

Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie 1900 was inspired by the life of one of his sisters, who had eloped to New York with a disreputable lover. Its sympathetic depiction of Carrie s love affairs shocked its publisher, whose grudging efforts won few initial readers until the book s successful re publication in 1907. Today it resonates with Dreiser s clear sighted understanding of life in the increasingly mercantile world of the big city, and with his belief in the domination of fate over free will. Particularly in the unflinching tragedy of its final chapters, the novel broke new ground in American fiction for its gritty realism and for the character of Carrie, who begins a half equipped little knight and becomes a truly modern woman.

Herbert Leibowitz is the editor and publisher of Parnassus: Poetry in Review. His books include Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography and Hart Crane: An Introduction to the Poetry. He is currently writing a critical biography of William Carlos Williams.

Jennie Gerhardt

An excerpt: One morning, in the fall of 1880, a middle aged woman, accompanied by a young girl of eighteen, presented herself at the clerk’s desk of the principal hotel in Columbus, Ohio, and made inquiry as to whether there was anything about the place that she could do. She was of a helpless, fleshy build, with a frank, open countenance and an innocent, diffident manner. Her eyes were large and patient, and in them dwelt such a shadow of distress as only those who have looked sympathetically into the countenances of the distraught and helpless poor know anything about. Any one could see where the daughter behind her got the timidity and shamefacedness which now caused her to stand back and look indifferently away. She was a product of the fancy, the feeling, the innate affection of the untutored but poetic mind of her mother combined with the gravity and poise which were characteristic of her father. Poverty was driving them. Together they presented so appealing a picture of honest necessity that even the clerk was affected. ‘What is it you would like to do?’ he said. ‘Maybe you have some cleaning or scrubbing,’ she replied, timidly. ‘I could wash the floors.’

The Genius

Dreiser’s captivating portraits of turn of the century America’s famous figures Before coming to national attention for his novel Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser worked for nearly a decade as a magazine editor and freelance writer. Now in paperback, Art, Music, and Literature, 1897 1902 collects a rich selection of Dreiser’s brief, colorful articles and interviews with American artists, musicians, and writers during this period. His profiles and interviews include such notables as Alfred Stieglitz, William Dean Howells, and legendary impresario Major James Burton Pond, as well as numerous women artists, novelists, and musicians. The volume is liberally seasoned with period illustrations reproduced from the original publications, and Yoshinobu Hakutani’s notes provide biographical details about Dreiser’s various subjects.

An American Tragedy

A tremendous bestseller when it was published in 1925, An American Tragedy is the culmination of Theodore Dreiser’s elementally powerful fictional art. Taking as his point of departure a notorious murder case of 1910, Dreiser immersed himself in the social background of the crime to produce a book that is both a remarkable work of reportage and a monumental study of character. Few novels have undertaken to track so relentlessly the process by which an ordinary young man becomes 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, Dreiser created an unforgettable portrait of a man whose circumstances and dreams of self betterment conspire to pull him toward an act of unforgivable violence. Around Clyde, Dreiser builds an extraordinarily detailed fictional portrait of early twentieth century America, its religious and sexual hypocrisies, its economic pressures, its political corruption. The sheer prophetic amplitude of his bitter truth telling, in idiosyncratic prose of uncanny expressive power, continues to mark Dreiser as a crucially important American writer. An American Tragedy, the great achievement of his later years, is a work of mythic force, at once brutal and heartbreaking.

Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural

This is a pre 1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Dawn

In the 1910s, in early middle age, Theodore Dreiser, already America’s great gritty realist, began to take stock of his crowded, complicated life and of the persons and forces that had shaped it. He embarked upon a multi volume work he planned to call ‘A History of Myself,’ a brutally honest untangling of ‘the net of flesh and emotion and human relationship into which I was born and which conditioned my early efforts at living.’ By 1916 he had completed the first volume, Dawn, a chronicle of his poor Midwestern boyhood and a book so candid and sexually explicit that, out of respect for his family’s feelings, he delayed its publication for fifteen years. In 1922, he finished the second, Newspaper Days, the story of his literary apprenticeship in the roughneck world of big city dailies. Together they constitute one of the great American autobiographies, less known perhaps than those of Henry Adams and Ulysses S. Grant but in every way worthy of the same short shelf. This Black Sparrow edition, introduced and annotated by Dreiser scholar T. D. Nostwich, is definitive. An autobiography of early youth published in 1931, just as the country was entering the darkest days of the Great Depression, Dawn is a major American writer’s engrossing effort to understand how he had become the person that he was. It opens in a small house on a dingy street in Terre Haute, Indiana, where the author is born, the ninth of ten children, on August 27, 1871. Central to Dreiser’s story is his Czech mother’s struggle to keep her family together in the face of chronic poverty and her husband’s inability to earn a living. She is all enduring and all forgiving, one of Dreiser’s triumphs of characterization. The father, a disabled German Catholic millworker, is pitiful, luckless, and powerless to impress his moral authority on his indifferent children, all of whom are magnetized by pleasure and material display. They are the musically talented Paul, a simple hearted, generous sensualist; the sullen Rome, an amoral wanderer, often in jail, always full of drink and braggadocio; the four sisters, looking only for fun, finery, and handsome moneyed young men; and Theodore, sickly, withdrawn, finding beauty in nature and in books but little solace from his inborn fatalism. As Professor Nostwich comments, ‘The conclusions Dreiser drew about the insignificance of his and all human existence goes against the grain of Christian and American optimism but does not alter the fact that Dawn is a uniquely American book. It is the fullest, truest account we have of what it was like to grow up poor in the American Midwest in the late nineteenth century, an age of unsettling social and moral change. It is the story of an idling but insatiably curious, sensuous, and sensual youth’s effort to know himself and find his place in a rigidly moralistic and rampantly materialistic society, one that prized the go getter but had little use for the dreamer.’

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