8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Semi-autobiographical Dreiser Novel, August 1, 2001
I sought this novel to supplement the memoirs "Dawn" and "Newspaper Days" as a way to gain additional insight into Theodore Dreiser's intriguing personality. I was not disappointed. The book provides information about Dreiser's sexual appetite, motivations, and philosophy. It also is an engaging read in the way that "Sister Carrie" and "Jennie Gerhart" are. Sure, Dreiser can go on in detail in ways that an editor could have made more succinct, and his sentence structure could become byzantine or odd. But the plot is well structured and the sense of impending doom that crops up is mercifully relented so that the novel does not become as squirm-inducing as "An Amercian Tragedy." The reader's sympathy is evenly divided among the principles and the events are seen as fate intertwining with the forces and choices of the personalities. Dreiser even more than Sinclair Lewis is my favorite depictor of U.S. life early in the 20th century.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good Navigation, March 3, 2011
This is what it says it is: a public domain text with navigation that allows the user to easily navigate the entire book, providing forward, backward and cross links to every section of the book. Most public domain texts (and far too many new texts) are just plain texts rendered into the Kindle format. This text was carefully constructed to fit the structure of this book.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
His most autobiographical novel - and his own favorite, August 13, 2006
This was Theodore Dreiser's favorite of his own novels - and his most autobiographical. Although Eugene Witla, the main character, is a painter, Dreiser modeled him so closely after himself that some critics have used incidents from the book as evidence for things in his own life. Much of the novel is an examination and criticism of the sexual mores of the time, which Dreiser felt restrictive and counter-productive.
In the initial section of the novel, after moving to Chicago to pursue a career as an artist, Witla meets Angela Blue; after enjoying much of what the city has to offer (including other woman), Angela and Witla marry.
The next part of the book is concerned mainly with Witla trying to make it as a struggling artist. Like Dreiser himself, Witla works for a while as a manual laborer and then as an illustrator in an advertising agency, where he shows some success.
But Witla can't control his restless sexual impulses and much of the last section of the novel concerns his affair with the very young Suzanne Dale, who is too immature and controlled by her mother to return Witla's affections. Angela also becomes pregnant at this time; after Suzanne is dragged off to Europe by her mother, thus ending anything that existed between her daughter and Witla, Angela delivers a baby girl but dies in the process. The book ends with an apparently wiser Witla caring for his daughter, also named Angela.
The last section is the least effective: what Witla could see in Suzanne Dale is hard to imagine. The early parts of the book are extremely well done, however. What distinguishes the book (and also got it banned) is Dreiser's unflinching portrayal of female sexual desire being as strong as the male's. In the midst of Witla's seduction of Angela, she is in a state of ecstasy even greater than Witla's: "She threw herself back in a transport of agony and delight. `Save me from myself,' she begs him, `I am no better than any other, but I have waited so long, so long!'" Like just about all of Dreiser's novels, it is too long and at times is a hodge-podge of ideas and sensations, but it's an honest book and reveals its purposes realistically, one adult to another.
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