The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser [Hardcover]

Jerome Loving (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2005

When Theodore Dreiser first published Sister Carrie in 1900 it was suppressed for its seamy plot, colloquial language, and immorality--for, as one reviewer put it, its depiction of "the godless side of American life." It was a side of life experienced firsthand by Dreiser, whose own circumstances often paralleled those of his characters in the turbulent, turn-of-the-century era of immigrants, black lynchings, ruthless industrialists, violent labor movements, and the New Woman. This masterful critical biography, the first on Dreiser in more than half a century, is the only study to fully weave Dreiser's literary achievement into the context of his life. Jerome Loving gives us a Dreiser for a new generation in a brilliant evocation of a writer who boldly swept away Victorian timidity to open the twentieth century in American literature.
Dreiser was a controversial figure in his time, not only because of his literary efforts, which included publication of the brutal and heartbreaking An American Tragedy in 1925, but also because of his personal life, which featured numerous sexual liaisons, included membership in the communist party, merited a 180-page FBI file, and ended in Hollywood. The Last Titan paints a full portrait of the mature Dreiser between the two world wars--through the roaring twenties, the stock market crash, and the Depression--and describes his contact with important figures from Emma Goldman and H.L. Mencken to two presidents Roosevelt. Tracing Dreiser's literary roots in Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and especially Whitman, Loving has written what will surely become the standard biography of one of America's best novelists.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Dreiser (1871–1945), author of two of the most famous American novels in the naturalist school, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, rose from poverty to the top of the literary world, crossing paths with prostitutes and thugs (some of them his own siblings) as well as social reformers and presidents, all of whom informed the seemingly amoral universe of his fiction. It's easy to see why a biographer would be attracted to such rich subject matter. But Loving, biographer of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, has specific goals, which do not include painting a psychologically probing portrait of his subject (although one parenthetical aside suggests that Dreiser may have suffered from bipolar disorder—an intriguing and possibly groundbreaking idea that is dropped immediately). Instead, he races through the details of Dreiser's life in order to find the true antecedents and literary context of Dreiser's work. To do so, Loving turns to that work—whether books or magazine articles—for source material. While this account does the reader the favor of collecting all that material in one place and draws a thorough time line of Dreiser's life, it adds little to our knowledge of a major American writer. 47 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)
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Review

"Jerome Loving has produced an immensely readable, lively, detailed account of Theodore Dreiser's life, always with one eye on Dreiser's great books. This is vivid biography, bringing the man very much to life. The streets, the newsrooms, the rented rooms, the yearning of the young Dreiser for money, fame, women, good things in life, keeps reminding the reader of Dreiser's own Carrie and Clyde." - Robert D. Richardson, Jr., author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (March 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520234812
• ISBN-13: 978-0520234819
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,532,830 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Titanic, January 21, 2006

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Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser (Hardcover)

I have to disagree with the Publishers Weekly reviewer who states that Loving doesn't seem interested in finding out what made Theodore Dreiser tick. I walked away from this hurricane of a book feeling I knew TD inside out (and incidentally more than a bit about Loving as well)! A difficult figure to classify, Dreiser has been cursed for decades by having a friend like HL Mencken, a man who praised him to the skies on the one hand, but on the other let the whole world know his real opinion, that Dreiser was an oversexed drunk who couldn't write his way out of a paper bag. Mencken's tributes to Dreiser's "power" were like Norman Mailer's tributes to Muhammad Ali, to be honored more in the breach than in the observance. And thus generations of students and readers have only picked at Dreiser warily, feeling that some of his low-class trashy ways might rub off on them.

Loving at least has no fear, and walks in like an angel into a landscape littered with the corpses of previous biographers. He focuses Dreiser's development right at the mirror stage, as it were, with his intense relationship with Sarah, his mother, and a brooding, quarrelsome batch of siblings. Among them was the Indiana songbird, Psul Dresser (who changed his name from "Dreiser" for show biz reasons) who wrote many hit tunes for Tin Pan Alley before an untimely death. For some reason Loving feels it necessary to state, more than once, that Paul Dresser is forgotten today, but how true is that? Not very! And a film like "My Gal Sal," with Victor Mature and Rita Hayworth, Phil Silvers and Carole Landis--a Fox biopic of the songwriter--is every bit as good a film as the more portentous pictures drawn from Dreiser's own writings. I love Wyler's CARRIE and Stevens' PLACE IN THE SUN, but even Dreiser's greatest fans would admit theu're heavy sledding.

Loving takes particular pains with the first half of TD's life, the formative years, and lets the last half of his life slip by in a mere hundred pages, so he's actually skimming a bit, but one feels that the balance is essentially correct. I can't imagine a better biography of our weirdest novelist. Loving makes you want to read even the later books, like THE STOIC and THE BULWARK, books that haven't been cracked open since 1947. He explains the reasons why Mencken turned on Dreiser--basically Dreiser came to Baltimore to visit at a time when Mencken's mother was very sick, on her deathbed, upstairs, and he didn't even have the politesse to ask after the old woman. He was self-centered, true. Loving is also very good about explaining how old two fisted Dreiser wound up editing women's magazines at the turn of the century and how he changed their course, and how the demands of the profession changed his own writing, perhaps required him to spend more time thinking about women. Loving states that Dreiser was the first important US writer to have descended from a country other than England. Interesting, but it sort of negates the achievements of some black American novelists I think.