Dawn: An Autobiography of Early Youth [Hardcover]

Theodore Dreiser (Author), T. D. Nostwich (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1998 | ISBN-10: 1574230751 | ISBN-13: 978-1574230758 | Edition: Deluxe

About Dawn: 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and braggadocio; the four sisters, looking only for fun, finery, and handsome moneyed young men; and Theodore, sickly, withdrawn, finding beauty in nature and in books but little solace from his inborn fatalism.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 600 pages
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Pr; Deluxe edition (November 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1574230751
• ISBN-13: 978-1574230758
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,325,647 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dreiser On Dreiser Is Still Dry, Sir., August 29, 2001

By 

Mark Valentine (Port Angeles, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dawn: An Autobiography of Early Youth (Paperback)

Although he published this volume (second after Newspaper Days, chronologically), Dreiser intended Dawn to be the first of four autobiographies, each covering approximately 20 years of his life. This confirms Dreiser's ambition, but doesn't place this book in the prize category of great autobiographical works. For all of his professed candor, Dreiser still skirts personal truths for the protocol, and his sentences wind and ramble and repeat like an electric train on contorted tracks.
If you liked Sister Carrie and some of his other longer fictions, this extra reading may be helpful, but if you want to go for the "red meat" of Dreiser's life, I'd encourage a reading of his American Notebooks--his journals, published after his death and never really intended for publication. In them, boy oh boy, does the real Dreiser sans facade emerge.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible Memoir Writing, August 1, 2001

By 

disco75 "disco75" (State College, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dawn: An Autobiography of Early Youth (Paperback)

"Dawn" may be stronger than Dreiser's fiction, which is saying a good deal. He shows a remarkable memory and attention to detail. I am admittedly biased because I identified so closely with his experiences as a child, youth, and adult, but the scenes in this volume are well drawn and he overcomes his sometimes florid style and difficulties with fluid language well here. Along with "Newspaper Days," one gets an intimate look at the life of this talented and important author.

4.0 out of 5 stars read this from dusk till d-d-dawn, January 31, 2006

By 

Custard (Columbus, OH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dawn (Hardcover)

Dreiser follows such a simple structure. First, the dreamy, hypnotic recurrent images of early childhood, that only melted into perspective years later. Second, the glory of sexual awakening, mixed with the whitewater current of ambition, shuffling like white noise into his consciousness only once he tunes his ears to listen.

To the details. Dreiser loved his mother, in a way that may have swung past the platonic, and certainly shaped his female ideal. She does seem an ideal parent, with her selfless love, endless devotion in hard work, and support regardless of the wayward tendencies of her iconoclastic brood. His father seems little more than a hollowed out Jesus enthusiast, who, following the personal disaster that surely damaged his brain, emptily follows Christ's lead by punishing his children for not being religious enough.

Dreiser himself came of age by losing it to the immigrant bakery owner's daughter, an idle miscreant long forgotten outside these pages. Dreiser was bound by two diametrically opposed desires - one for sex, the other for love, and as a wise man once said, these rarely overlap, especially for Dreiser in his early youth. His platonic ideal is the shy, frumpy type, while he can't help but be lured in by the pretty ones. His sex complex keeps him from many a lay, which he overcomes by ravishing a young Italian waywardess.

Poe once said something like "Any man who chooses to tell about his life the way it really is will change the world forever, but no one has the courage to do it." Dreiser comes close, though I doubt this has stood much ground the test of time. I was referred to it by one of Fitzgerald's early characters. Dreiser doesn't hesitate to wag his finger at himself, and never, ever makes me wish not to have had the golden opportunity to join him for lunch of a foggy Tuesday.