hwaag.blogg.se

Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” This book was quite scandalous for its times - vulgar, immoral, risqué. “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Needless to say, the combination of Dreiser being way over my head, my limited English skills and only so much patience an 11-year-old would have with a dictionary, I soon enough started getting distracted by the afternoon episodes of Duck Tales, and therefore my memory of this book has long been just a bit fuzzy.Īnd so I read it again with a set of grown-up eyeballs, sans dictionary this time, armed with a few more gray hairs (all twenty of them) and a hint of a wrinkle. Awed by the idea of a big book in a language I just started to somewhat understand, I reached for it, just missing the much more age-appropriate Treasure Island - but then why'd you think I'd ever want to follow rules? I was 11, my mother just bought me a brand-spanking-new English dictionary, and my school librarians finally let me roam the section of the library where normally kids were not allowed to wreak havoc in on their own.

Inspired by the writings of Balzac and the ideas of Spenser and Freud, Dreiser went on to become one of America’ s best naturalist writers.

The brooding force of Dreiser’ s writing casts a dark shadow across American letters.

They are unapologetic in their sexual candor-in fact, outrightly frank-and challenge even modern readers. Yet he remains for myriad reasons: his novels are often larger than life, rugged, and defy the norms of conventional morality and organized religion. He has no Pulitzer or Nobel Prize to signify his importance. The Indiana-born Dreiser (1871-1945) has never cut a dashing or romantic swath through American literature.