Literary Birthday – 27 August – Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser was born on 27 August 1871 and died on 28 December 1945.

Theodore Dreiser Quotes

1. Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
2. The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions – none more so than the most capable.
3. Only in rare instances and with rare individuals does there seem to be any guiding light from within.
4. A thought will colour a world for us.
5. Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
6. Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives’ tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.
7. Love is the only thing you can really give in all this world. When you give love, you give everything.

Theodore Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist who became a leading writer of the naturalist school. His fiction often explored how poverty, ambition, chance, and social forces shaped people’s lives in a rapidly changing, industrialised America. Dreiser published his first novel, Sister Carrie, in 1900. It follows Caroline Meeber, a young woman who leaves her small town for Chicago and seeks a better life, while a married man who becomes involved with her suffers a very different fate. The novel established Dreiser as an important voice in American literature. His best-known novel, An American Tragedy, was based on a notorious murder case. His other works include the short story collections Free and Other Stories, Chains, and A Gallery of Women, as well as the memoirs A Hoosier Holiday, A Book About Myself, and Dawn. Dreiser’s writing often focused on characters who struggle to achieve their desires. He also examined materialism, ambition, poverty, and the moral compromises people make in their search for success. His appearance and personality were later captured by poet Edgar Lee Masters in Theodore Dreiser: A Portrait.

Source for image: Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Theodore_Dreiser.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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