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ruction, he was hit in the head with a beam. He never fully recovered and as a result he became deeply religious. Soon his business partners cheated him. The family was perennial poor forced frequently to move between small Indiana towns and Chicago in search of lower living costs in order to survive. His mother was a gentle and compassionate woman. She had Czech Mennonite background. Though the family’s experience of deprivation, he spoke and wrote of his mother with unswerving affection..
At the age of fifteen, Theodore Dreiser moved to Chicago and took various jobs such as washing dishes, clerking in a hardware store and so on. Fortunately when he was eighteen, a teacher recognized his talent and lent money to him and he could attend to Indiana University in Bloomington. In the university, he extensively read such writers as Darwin, Shakespeare and Spenser. He was soon interested in journalism, but he returned to Chicago and worked as a bill collector, real estate clerk and laundry-truck driver. Dreiser was even educated from direct personal experience and he had independent reading and thinking. He was affected by Spencer’s Social Darwinism. Dreiser first entered the newspaper office by dispensing toys at Christmas. He subsequently got hired as a club reporter with the Chicago Globe and later went to St. Louis as a feature writer for the Globe-Democrat. Then, he left St. Louis and moved to Pittsburg working with the Dispatch. He finally became a freelance journalist and magazine editor in New York City. His editor friend, Author Henry gave him the suggestion. Dreiser began writing his first novel the Sister Carrier (1900). With the publications of the Financier（1912）,a novel based on the life of Clarles T. Yerkes, Genius (1915) a novel of the egocentric artistic personality, was banned but a year later a petition protesting.
An American Tragedy（1925）,based on an actual criminal case in history, had been regarded as the greatest novel in American letters. In the book, Dreiser explored the plight of individuals who were caught between universal and American force by cheating a character that had neither internal nor external power to satisfy the necessities that drove him. In the consequent soul-hunger, desperation, and eventual destruction of an ordinary person, Dreiser questioned the moral. In 1944, Dreiser was awarded the Merit Medal for Fiction by the American Academy of Art and Letters. In 1945, he died at his home in southern California.
Dreiser was a great naturalism writer. He wrote his work on the basic principle of naturalism. He and his works of the real life do not attack the nation’s puritanical moral code; they ignore it. Then, his attitude stocked the genteel public probably more than the others. Because he was born from poverty, and he had harsh experience of poverty, suffered enough distress from unemployment and poverty. He had enough knowledge and deep sympathy. In the early years, Dreiser was affected by social Darwinism, but from 1920s he turned to realism and even naturalism, as got large advance in the American literature history. As one of great American writer of naturalism, he was works were greatly influenced by Herbert Spenser, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Max and Honoree de Balzac in his works.
B. A Brief Introduction of an American Tragedy
An American Tragedy tells about a tragic story. The story was based on a popular murder case. In the story, Clyde was a less succes