Theodore Dreiser

Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871 and later working as a journalist, Theodore Dreiser brought a reporter’s eye for detail to his fiction. Britannica describes him as a leading American practitioner of naturalism, a style that looked hard at how money, class, desire, and circumstance shape ordinary lives.

His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), became a landmark of American realism, and An American Tragedy (1925) remains his best-known later work. He also wrote Jennie Gerhardt and the Trilogy of Desire, including The Financier and The Titan, often focusing on characters driven by hunger for success in a fast-changing industrial America.

What still makes Dreiser feel alive is his refusal to tidy people up. His novels are serious, compassionate, and sometimes stark, but they opened the way for a more candid kind of American storytelling.