Customer Reviews

Dawn: An Autobiography of Early Youth

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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.

"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.

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.