A Hoosier holiday; (1916) by: Theodore Dreiser: Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer living in New York. He had not been back to his home state in over 20 years. When his friend Franklin Booth approached him with the idea of driving from New York to Indiana, Dreiser's response to Booth was immediate: "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it." Along the route, Dreiser recorded his impressions of the people and land in words while his traveling companion sketched some of these scenes. In this reflective tale, Dreiser and Booth cross four states to arrive at Indiana and the sites and memories of Dreiser's early life in Terre Haute, Sullivan, Evansville, Warsaw, and his one year at Indiana University. "Because [the book] provides a portrait of the artist as a young man and describes the nation as a mosaic of individual cultures, Dreiser's journey offers several different lessons. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part collection of essays, A Hoosier Holiday lays out the landscape of a nation that ceased to exist once the highway unfurled across the map." -Publishers Weekly Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser ( August 27, 1871 - December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency.Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925). In 1930 he was nominated to the Nobel Prize in Literature. Early life--Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Sarah Maria (née Schanab) and John Paul Dreiser.John Dreiser was a German immigrant from Mayen in the Eifel region, and Sarah was from the Mennonite farming community near Dayton, Ohio. Her family disowned her for converting to Roman Catholicism in order to marry John Dreiser. Theodore was the twelfth of thirteen children (the ninth of the ten surviving). Paul Dresser (1857-1906) was one of his older brothers; Paul changed the spelling of his name as he became a popular songwriter. They were reared as Catholics.After graduating from high school in Warsaw, Indiana, Dreiser attended Indiana University in the years 1889-1890 before dropping out.Writing career--Within several years, Dreiser was writing as a journalist for the Chicago Globe newspaper and then the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He wrote several articles on writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Israel Zangwill, John Burroughs, and interviewed public figures such as Andrew Carnegie, Marshall Field, Thomas Edison, and Theodore Thomas.Other interviewees included Lillian Nordica, Emilia E. Barr, Philip Armour and Alfred Stieglitz.During 1899, the Dreisers stayed with Arthur Henry and his wife, Maude Wood Henry, at the House of Four Pillars, an 1830s Greek Revival house in the Toledo, Ohio suburb of Maumee.There Dreiser began work on his first novel, Sister Carrie, published in 1900.Unknown to Maude, Henry sold a half-interest in the house to Dreiser, to finance a move to New York without her.In Sister Carrie, Dreiser portrayed a changing society, writing about a young woman who flees rural life for the city (Chicago) and struggles with poverty, complex relationships with men, and prostitution. It sold poorly and was considered controversial because of moral objections to his featuring a country girl who pursues her dreams of fame and fortune through relationships with men. The book has since acquired a considerable reputation. It has been called the "greatest of all American urban novels."It was adapted as a 1952 film by the same name, directed by William Wyler and starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones.etc..