English for extramural students [antikvár]

TEXT FOR INTENSIVE READING Th. Dreiser (1871—1945) Theodore Dreiser was born in a poor family and after his school years he had to support himself by doing odd jobs. He worked in a laun- dry, was a rent collector for a rich owner of apartment houses. For several years he worked as newspaper reporter in Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland and Pittsburg. Then he moved to New York, where he obtained work as magazine editor. From the very beginning of his literary work, he opposed the bour- geois writers who idealized capitalist America, and he wrote his own works to reveal the truth about it. Boycott by publishers, hostile criti- cism, persecution by the law, all these Dreiser had to overcome in order to reach his public. His life was a constant battle for realistic literature against unfavourable conditions created by the American bourgeoisie. The fate of two women described by Dreiser in his first two novels, Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911) was a challenge to the moral claims of the American bourgeoisie. The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914) together with The Stoic (published posthumously in 1947) formed The Trilogy of Desire, a complete life story of an Amer- ican capitalist, showing the unscrupulousness and brutality with which the wealth of the big capitalists is amassed. The Genius (1915) dealt with the fate of an artist, showing the destructive influence of bourgeois environment upon the hero's creative abilities. An American Tragedy (1925), Dreiser's masterpiece, is a story of a life mutilated by the conditions of the American social system. The significance of the novel was in the exposure of the tragic character of American life with its contrast of poverty and wealth, social inequal- ity, corrupt bourgeois morals and a reactionary political system, all of which contribute to the ultimate fate of the hero who ends his life in the electric chair. In 1927 Dreiser was a guest of the Soviet Government. He described his visit to the USSR in Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928) in which he greeted enthusiastically the first proletarian state in the world and expressed his love and admiration for the Soviet people. What Dreiser saw in Russia