Customer Reviews

The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser

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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.