Download or read book The American Diaries 1902 1926 written by Theodore Dreiser and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreiser's careful preservation of his papers bears new fruit with the publication of his personal diaries for the years 1902-26. This volume presents all seven of Dreiser's hitherto unpublished American diaries, the intermittent journals he kept during the most productive years of his literary career. Together they constitute a revealing self-portrait as well as a valuable commentary on the American scene during the first quarter of the twentieth century. They offer reflections on turn-of-the-century Philadelphia, the American South and Mid-West, Greenwich Village of the nineteen-teens, and Hollywood of the twenties. The diaries begin in 1902, when Dreiser was at a low point after the "suppression" of Sister Carrie, and continue until 1926, when he was enjoying the greatest success of his career with An American Tragedy. This publication constitutes in its entirety a new source for biographical and critical study. This is particularly true of the diaries covering Dreiser's experience in Philadelphia, Greenwich Village, and with Helen Richardson—all of which were not available to previous biographers. The present Introduction by Professor Riggio is the first biographical narrative to make use of these materials. Future biographers will now be able to speak with more assurance of Dreiser's whereabouts, the people he knew, what he was reading, which writings were in progress, and of his fascinating private affairs in general. In addition, these diaries will be of interest to students of Dreiser's literary art, as they reveal subtle aspects of how Dreiser viewed the external world and transmuted it in his daily creative efforts.
Download or read book The American Diaries 1902 1926 written by Theodore Dreiser and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreiser's careful preservation of his papers bears new fruit with the publication of his personal diaries for the years 1902-26. This volume presents all seven of Dreiser's hitherto unpublished American diaries, the intermittent journals he kept during the most productive years of his literary career. Together they constitute a revealing self-portrait as well as a valuable commentary on the American scene during the first quarter of the twentieth century. They offer reflections on turn-of-the-century Philadelphia, the American South and Mid-West, Greenwich Village of the nineteen-teens, and Hollywood of the twenties. The diaries begin in 1902, when Dreiser was at a low point after the "suppression" of Sister Carrie, and continue until 1926, when he was enjoying the greatest success of his career with An American Tragedy. This publication constitutes in its entirety a new source for biographical and critical study. This is particularly true of the diaries covering Dreiser's experience in Philadelphia, Greenwich Village, and with Helen Richardson—all of which were not available to previous biographers. The present Introduction by Professor Riggio is the first biographical narrative to make use of these materials. Future biographers will now be able to speak with more assurance of Dreiser's whereabouts, the people he knew, what he was reading, which writings were in progress, and of his fascinating private affairs in general. In addition, these diaries will be of interest to students of Dreiser's literary art, as they reveal subtle aspects of how Dreiser viewed the external world and transmuted it in his daily creative efforts.
Download or read book For Sale American Paradise written by Willie Drye and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal for Best Regional Nonfiction in the Southwest The story of how Florida became entwined with Americans’ 20th-century hopes, dreams, and expectations is also a tale of mass delusion, real estate collapses, and catastrophic hurricanes. The Fantasy of Florida hones in on the experiences of William Jennings Bryan and Edwin Menninger, the two men who shaped the image of Florida that we know today and who sold that image as America’s paradise. The cast of characters also includes the Marx Brothers, Thomas Edison, Al Capone, and Mark Twain. A tale of a colorful and tragicomic era during which the allure and illusion of the American Dream was on full display—a Jazz Age period when Americans started chasing what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the orgiastic future”—the book reveals how the recent economic collapse in Florida is eerily similar to events that happened there between 1925 and 1928. What sets the mid-1920s’ Florida land boom apart from more recent booms-and-busts, however, is that this was the first modern boom, the first time that emerging new technologies, mass communications and modern advertising techniques were used to sell the nation on the notion that prosperity and happiness are simply there for the taking. Florida’s image as a place where the rules of everyday life don’t apply and winners go to play was formed during this dawn of the age of consumerism when Americans wanted to have fun and make lots of money, and millions of them thought Florida was the perfect place to do that.
Download or read book A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia written by Keith Newlin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-07-30 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a century, Theodore Dreiser has represented for many readers a rebellious modernism whose novels both critiqued the American dream and embodied a bleakly deterministic perception of life. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), was reluctantly published and then ignored by its publisher, who thought the book immoral. Another publisher withdrew his fifth novel, The Genius (1915), rather than face prosecution on obscenity charges. Dreiser did not enjoy widespread popularity and critical acclaim until his masterpiece, An American Tragedy, appeared in 1925. This reference is an authoritative guide to his life and works. Included are several hundred entries on each of Dreiser's books and short stories, as well as magazine and newspaper pieces he collected during his life. Noteworthy uncollected and posthumously collected works are given separate entries, as are major characters in the novels, family members, friends, and other persons important to understanding his writings. There are also entries on Dreiser's publishers, his major influences, the places and events important to his life, and the literary and social contexts of his works. Expert contributors wrote each of the entries, many of which cite works for further reading. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of works by and about Dreiser.
Download or read book Sixteen Modern American Authors written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the earlier edition: "Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--Sixteenth Modern American Authors--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains."--American Studies
Download or read book The Last Titan written by Jerome Loving and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-03 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterful critical biography of the author of Sister Carrie interweaves Dreiser's literary accomplishments into the context of his life, detailing his turbulent personal life, membership in the communist party, numerous sexual liaisons, and literary work and its lasting influence on the course of twentieth-century American literature.
Download or read book Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth century American Literature written by Jennifer Travis and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-03-12 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-Century Americans saw danger lurking everywhere: in railway cars and trolleys, fireplaces and floods, and amid social and political movements, from the abolition of slavery to suffrage. After the Civil War, Americans were shaken by financial panic and a volatile post-slave economy. They were awe-struck and progressively alarmed by technological innovations that promised speed and commercial growth, but also posed unprecedented physical hazard. Most of all, Americans were uncertain, particularly in light of environmental disasters like hurricanes and wildfires, about their own city on a hill and the once indisputable and protective hand of a beneficent God. The disasters, accidents, and social and political upheavals that characterized nineteenth-century culture had enormous explanatory power, metaphoric and real. Today we speak of similar insecurities: financial, informational, environmental, and political, and we obsessively express our worry and fear for the future. Cultural theorist Paul Virilio refers to these feelings as the “threat horizon,” one that endlessly identifies and produces new dangers.Why, he asks, does it seem easier for humanity to imagine a future shaped by ever-deadlier accidents than a decent future? Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth Century American Literature; or, Crash and Burn American invites readers to examine the “threat horizon” through its nascent expression in literary and cultural history. Against the emerging rhetoric of danger in the long nineteenth century, this book examines how a vocabulary of vulnerability in the American imaginary promoted the causes of the structurally disempowered in new and surprising ways, often seizing vulnerability as the grounds for progressive insight. The texts at the heart of this study, from nineteenth-century sensation novels to early twentieth-century journalistic fiction, imagine spectacular collisions, terrifying conflagrations, and all manner of catastrophe, social, political, and environmental. Together they write against illusions of inviolability in a growing technological and managerial culture, and they imagine how the recognition of universal vulnerability may challenge normative representations of social, political, and economic marginality.
Download or read book American Literary Naturalism written by Donald Pizer and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book collects Pizer’s late career essays on various writers and subjects related to American naturalism. Of these, two seek to describe the movement as a whole, six are on specific writers or works (with an emphasis on Theodore Dreiser), and two reprint informative interviews by Pizer on the subject. The essays reflect Pizer’s mature engagement of the subject he has spent a lifetime exploring.
Download or read book Letters to Women written by Theodore Dreiser and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theodore Dreiser led a long and controversial life, almost always pursuing some serious question, and not rarely pursuing women. This collection, the second volume of Dreiser correspondence to be published by the University of Illinois Press, gathers previously unpublished letters Dreiser wrote to women between 1893 and 1945, many of them showing personal feelings Dreiser revealed nowhere else. Here he both preens and mocks himself, natters and scolds, relates his jaunts with Mencken and his skirmishes with editors and publishers. He admits his worries, bemoans his longings, and self-consciously embarks on love letters that are unafraid to smolder and flame. To one reader he sends “Kisses, Kisses, Kisses, for your sweety mouth” and urges his needy requests: “Write me a love-letter Honey girl.” Alongside such amorous play, he often expressed his deepest feelings on philosophical, religious, and social issues that characterize his public writing. Chronologically arranged and meticulously edited by Thomas P. Riggio, these letters reveal how wide and deep Dreiser’s needs were. Dreiser often discussed his writing in his letters to women friends, telling them what he wanted to do, where he thought he succeeded and failed, and seeking approval or criticism. By turns seductive, candid, coy, and informative, these letters provide an intimate view of a master writer who knew exactly what he was after.
Download or read book Cinematic Fictions written by David Seed and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phrase 'cinematic fiction' has now been generally accepted into critical discourse, but is usually applied to post-war novels. This book asks a simple question: given their fascination with the new medium of film, did American novelists attempt to apply cinematic methods in their own writings? From its very beginnings the cinema has played a special role in defining American culture. Covering the period from the 1910s up to the Second World War, Cinematic Fictions offers new insights into classics like The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath discussing major writers' critical writings on film and active participation in film-making. Cinematic Fictions is also careful not to portray 'cinema' as a single or stable entity. Some novelists drew on silent film; others looked to the Russian theorists for inspiration; and yet others turned to continental film-makers rather than to Hollywood. Film itself was constantly evolving during the first decades of the twentieth century and the writers discussed here engaged in a kind of dialogue with the new medium, selectively pursuing strategies of montage, limited point of view and scenic composition towards their different ends. Contrasting a diverse range of cinematic and literary movements, this will be compulsory reading for scholars of American literature and film.
Download or read book Re Constructing the Book written by Maureen Bell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2001. Literary critics, textual editors and bibliographers, and historians of publishing have hitherto tended to publish their research as if in separate fields of enquiry. The purpose of this volume is to bring together contributions from these fields in a dialogue rooted in the transmission of texts. Arranged chronologically, so as to allow the use of individual sections relevant to period literature courses, the book offers students and teachers a set of essays designed to reflect these approaches and to signal their potential for fruitful integration. Some of the essays answer the demand "Show me what literary critics (or textual editor; or book historians) do and how they do it", and stand as examples of the different concerns, methodologies and strategies employed. Others draw attention to the potential of the approaches in combination.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser written by Leonard Cassuto and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-02-12 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theodore Dreiser is one of the most penetrating observers of the greatest period of social change the United States ever saw. Writing as America emerged as the world's wealthiest nation, Dreiser chronicled industrial and economic transformation and the birth of consumerism with an unmatched combination of detail, sympathy, and power. The specially commissioned essays collected in this volume are written by a leading team of scholars of American literature and culture. They establish parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Dreiser. This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read classics, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Dreiser's representation of the city and his prose style. The volume investigates topics such as his representation of masculinity and femininity, and his treatment of ethnicity. It is the most comprehensive introduction to Dreiser's work available.
Download or read book Sister Carrie written by Theodore Dreiser and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2000-11-01 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time 'American writing, before and after Dreiser's time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin,' said H. L. Mencken. Sister Carrie, Dreiser's great first novel, transformed the conventional 'fallen woman' story into a bold and truly innovative piece of fiction when it appeared in 1900. Naïve young Caroline Meeber, a small-town girl seduced by the lure of the modern city, becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman and then of a saloon manager, who elopes with her to New York. Both its subject matter and Dreiser's unsparing, nonjudgmental approach made Sister Carrie a controversial book in its time, and the work retains the power to shock readers today. 'Sister Carrie came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,' noted Sinclair Lewis. 'Dreiser enlarged, willy-nilly, by a kind of historical accident if you will, the range of American literature,' observed Robert Penn Warren. '[Sister Carrie] is a vivid and absorbing work of art.'
Download or read book Russian American Dialogue on Cultural Relations 1776 1914 written by Norman E. Saul and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian-American Dialogue on Cultural Relations, 1776-1914, the third volume in the Russian-American Dialogues series, provides English translations of the best Russian scholarship on cultural relations. Each essay originally appeared as an article in the former Soviet Union. Five issues are discussed: the contributions that each country made to the cultural life of the other; the correspondence and interactions between scientists, writers, and others from the two nations; the development of public perceptions and how these changed over time; the "American focus" in Russian periodicals during the nineteenth century; and the significant roles of Russians and the Russian presence in American history. The Russian articles on each of these subjects are followed by comments from American historians. The articles by the Russian scholars make extensive use of and liberally cite material from Russian archives and publications. As a result, they provide American readers with new scientific exchanges, personalities, and points of view. The result is a plethora of new material for Western historians of Russia as well as of the United States. The book provides an opportunity for scholars to examine more thoroughly the relevant issues of Russian-American cultural relations. An important scholarly contribution, Russian-American Dialogue on Cultural Relations, 1776-1914 brings a new dimension to the relationship between the United States and Russia before 1914. It will be of interest not only to historians of this period but to all historians and students of international cultural relations.
Download or read book Staging America written by Jeffery Kennedy and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive history of the Provincetown Players and their influence on modern American theatre The Provincetown Players created a revolution in American theatre, making room for truly modern approaches to playwriting, stage production, and performance unlike anything that characterized the commercial theatre of the early twentieth century. In Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players, Jeffery Kennedy gives readers the unabridged story in a meticulously researched and comprehensive narrative that sheds new light on the history of the Provincetown Players. This study draws on many new sources that have only become available in the last three decades; this new material modifies, refutes, and enhances many aspects of previous studies. At the center of the study is an extensive account of the career of George Cram Cook, the Players’ leader and artistic conscience, as well as one of the most significant facilitators of modernist writing in early twentieth-century American literature and theatre. It traces Cook’s mission of “cultural patriotism,” which drove him toward creating a uniquely American identity in theatre. Kennedy also focuses on the group of friends he calls the “Regulars,” perhaps the most radical collection of minds in America at the time; they encouraged Cook to launch the Players in Provincetown in the summer of 1915 and instigated the move to New York City in fall 1916. Kennedy has paid particular attention to the many legends connected to the group (such as the “discovery” of Eugene O’Neill), and also adds to the biographical record of the Players’ forty-seven playwrights, including Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Rita Wellman, Mike Gold, Djuna Barnes, and John Reed. Kennedy also examines other fascinating artistic, literary, and historical personalities who crossed the Players’ paths, including Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, Berenice Abbott, Sophie Treadwell, Theodore Dreiser, Claudette Colbert, and Charlie Chaplin. Kennedy highlights the revolutionary nature of those living in bohemian Greenwich Village who were at the heart of the Players and the America they were responding to in their plays.
Download or read book Hollywood s American Tragedies written by Mandy Merck and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2007-12-15 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood's obsession with "An American Tragedy", a tale of American greed, justice, religion and sexual hypocrisy stretches across the history of cinema. Presenting a sequence of adaptations, this work reveals the history of Hollywood - from its politics to its cinematography.
Download or read book American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900 written by James L. W. West, III and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-03 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines literary authorship in the twentieth century and covers such topics as publishing, book distribution, the trade editor, the literary agent, the magazine market, subsidiary rights, and the blockbuster mentality.
