Happy Birthday, Theodore Dreiser!

Saturday, August 27 is the birthday of Theodore Dreiser, born in Terre Haute, Indiana (1871). He arrived in Chicago as a youth and became a newspaper reporter. As a reporter, he wrote his first novel, his great masterpiece, in just a year. Sister Carrie was about a chorus girl who becomes a success, and it came out in 1900.

Sister Carrie begins: "When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken."

NOTE: Dreiser lived in Warsaw from 1884-1886. In 1916 he wrote A Hoosier Holiday, which describes his travels back to Warsaw years later. There is a lengthy quote from him about his experiences in Warsaw, including some of the stores and lakes, on pages 93-94 of Michelle Bormet's "A History of the City of Warsaw, Indiana."