Newspaper Days: An Autobiography

by Theodore Dreiser

During Christmas 1891, Dreiser, age twenty-one and miserable as a bill collector in Chicago, decided to find a job as a “I conceived of newspapers as wonderlands in which all concerned were prosperous and happy. . . I was also determined to shake off the garments of the commonplace in which I seemed swathed and step forth into the public arena, where I could be seen and understood for what I was―a writer.” He at last found a slot at the Chicago Daily Globe , helping cover the 1892 Democratic National Convention.
This, in turn, led to jobs with newspapers in St. Louis, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh―a scraping, unremunerative, eight-year journey through bustling railroad towns, with New York and Pulitzer’s World the final terminal. He started as a reporter, but found greater success as a feature writer, where he was better able to bend fact toward fiction. He specialized in lowlife stories, the research for which was a working education in the brutalities of “The police courts, the jails, the houses of ill repute, trade failures and trickery―it was all a grand magnificent ” a pageant of human weakness, wickedness, and survival through cunning and courage. “Everywhere I looked I found a terrifying desire for lust or pleasure or wealth, accompanied by a heartlessness which was freezing to the soul, or a dogged resignation to deprivation and misery.” He covered lynchings, streetcar strikes, robberies and murders―all of it testing his abilities as an observer and awakening the novelist within. It was the school that would prepare him for Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), and An American Tragedy (1925). First published in 1922 in what the editor calls an “expurgated abridgment,” Newspaper Days is here published in an edition based on Dreiser’s original typescript.

Genres: Biography, History, Journalism

771 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1991

About the author

Naturalistic novels of American writer and editor Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser portray life as a struggle against ungovernable forces. Value of his portrayed characters lies in their persistence against all obstacles, not their moral code, and literary situations more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency; this American novelist and journalist so pioneered the naturalist school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore...

Reviews

[John Otto · Rating 4 out of 5]

This autobiography covers only two years of Dreiser's life, the days he spent working as a newspaperman in Chicago, St. Louis, Toledo, Pittsburgh and New York City. It is exhaustingly detailed, running more than 700 pages and includes not only what he did but also philosophical thoughts. It is unusually frank for the era regarding his sexual experiences and as originally published large chunks of the book were omitted. The expurgated passages are restored in this project by scholars at the University of Pennsylvania. If you are a Dreiser fan, and I am, it is worth reading for more insight into the man.

[Josephine Rickard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought it was amazing. He's recollecting in his mid-fourties about the end of his newspaper career and his start of becoming the great author he became. His philosophy he used in novels and life is clarified and his indebtedness to Balzac, Spencer, and T.H. Huxley is well documented. Learn the inside secrets of the master! Probably want to read this new edition with extra philosphy and sexual escapades. Read a couple if not all the novels first.

[Judy]

longest, most pointless, self-indulgent book ever. not sister carrie!