"Ever since W. A. Swanberg’s roguish portrait of the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy appeared in 1965, Theodore Dreiser’s reputation as the first great American novelist of the twentieth century and the “father of American realism” has been tarnished, if not obscured, by his reputation as a philanderer. Indeed, Dreiser himself is partly to blame because he was painfully honest in his autobiographies and personal statements; moreover, he sometimes boasted of his success with women. The problem has been further compounded by books written by many of his lovers and the publication of his American Diaries in 1983. The heaviest blow was probably dealt by Yvette Eastman in Dearest Wilding: A Memoir (1995), in which it is revealed that the fifty-eight-year-old Dreiser took the sixteen-year-old future author to bed at his country retreat in Mt. Kisco, New York. Two of the book’s illustrations show the virginal-looking (she had earlier been seduced by Max Eastman) Yvette at age seventeen and a foxy-looking Dreiser in front of one of the log cabins on his Mt. Kisco estate."
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Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesAutobiographers from the United StatesJournalists from Indiana
Original Language: English
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Theodore Dreiser
1871 – 1945
US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller
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