Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist. He pioneered the naturalist school and is known for portraying characters whose value lies not in their moral code, but in their persistence against all obstacles, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore...
Interred at Forest Lawn (Glendale), Glendale, California, USA, in the Whispering Pines section, at the top of the hill.
Famously slapped Sinclair Lewis several times at a party in 1931 after Lewis refused to recant his accusation that Dreisers book "Dreiser Looks at Russia" contained sentences copied almost verbatim from "The New Russia", which was written by Lewis wife, Dorothy Thompson.
Brother of songwriter Paul Dresser.
He sued Paramount Pictures over Josef von Sternberg s adaptation of his novel "An American Tragedy" ( An American Tragedy ), forcing the studio to put back deleted scenes to make it conform better to the book. After seeing a preview of Paramounts Jennie Gerhardt , based upon his eponymous 1911 novel, he was so pleased that he sent a telegram to Paramount boss B.P. Schulberg: "Jennie moving improvisation upon my theme; excellently cast, beautifully interpreted.".
Theodore Dreiser married his second cousin Helen Richardson on June 13, 1944.
(About Hollywood in 1931) Just a small town with notions.
Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Carrie felt this as a personal reproof. She read "Dora Thorne," or had a great deal in the past. It seemed only fair to her, but she supposed that people thought it very fine. Now this clear- eyed, fine-headed youth, who looked something like a student to her, made fun of it. It was poor to him, not worth reading. She looked down, and for the first time felt the pain of not understanding.
When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.
Many individuals are so constituted that their only thought is to obtain pleasure and shun responsibility. They would like, butterfly-like, to wing forever in a summer garden, flitting from flower to flower, and sipping honey for their sole delight. They have no feeling that any result which might flow from their action should concern them. They have no conception of the necessity of a well-organized society wherein all shall accept a certain quota of responsibility and all realize a reasonable amount of happiness. They think only of themselves because they have not yet been taught to think of society. For them pain and necessity are the great taskmasters. Laws are but the fences which circumscribe the sphere of their operations. When, after error, pain falls as a lash, they do not comprehend that their suffering is due to misbehavior. Many such an individual is so lashed by necessity and law that he falls fainting to the ground, dies hungry in the gutter or rotting in the jail and it never once flashes across his mind that he has been lashed only in so far as he has persisted in attempting to trespass the boundaries which necessity sets. A prisoner of fate, held enchained for his own delight, he does not know that the walls are tall, that the sentinels of life are forever pacing, musket in hand. He cannot perceive that all joy is within and not without. He must be for scaling the bounds of society, for overpowering the sentinel. When we hear the cries of the individual strung up by the thumbs, when we hear the ominous shot which marks the end of another victim who has thought to break loose, we may be sure that in another instance life has been misunderstood--we may be sure that society has been struggled against until death alone would stop the individual from contention and evil.
How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
He paused, wishing to embrace her, but feeling for the moment that he should not. Then, reaching into a waistcoat pocket, he took from it a thin gold locket, the size of a silver dollar, which he opened and handed to her. One interior face of it was lined with a photograph of Berenice as a girl of twelve, thin, delicate, supercilious, self-contained, distant, as she was to this hour.
The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.
I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail. .
