Pretty Successful Representation Of The American Literature example essay topic

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), best known for his novels Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925), was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. His parents were German immigrants whose marriage resulted in thirteen children. Because his father was often ill and unemployed, the family struggled against poverty throughout Dreisers childhood. In rebellion against his fathers obsessive religiosity, Dreiser left home at fifteen for Chicago. There, after three years of menial jobs, he found work as a newspaper reporter. While Dreiser churned out hackwork for various periodicals, he was reading the deterministic philosophy of Herbert Spencer and the novels of Honore de Balzac, who believed in the evolutionary doctrine that life is a struggle in which instinctive human desires are often in conflict with conventional morality.

In 1918 Dreiser published his book with stories. One of the stories was the story called Free. Dreisers compassion toward his desperate fictional characters was less important to the early readers of his novel than the alleged immorality of his book. The Law of Life by Jack London is also considered to be one of the masterpieces of the American literature although this was actually a pretty hard story to read. This story tells people many significant things such as how the nature is actually moving towards the years. It does not really matter what kind of person meaning his social status, the color of his skin or any other factors, is being considered, all people are pretty equal in the love of nature.

Similarly all people will have the same ending of their lives which is death. Here we see that nature dont really care about any particular individual, but rather she cares for the well being of the whole tribe of humans meaning the whole human race. That was the time of the great famine and many people were dying, especially the younger ones because they were not so strong. In this representation we can see some reflections of the natural laws. Here the author represents the process of the natural selection, where only the strong survive, and that was one of such periods of American history when people were tested.

It is difficult to say of whether or not it was fair. The nature actually decides how it will act, but people themselves have a great deal of influence upon it and therefore they could have avoided such famine. Nowadays we still have many terrible famines around some places in the world, and the socio-economical improvement leads actually towards the minimizing such occurrences. Although natural resources are being abused now and the trends are towards the situation being even worth but that is completely different topic. Having considered the research of the pieces of the American literature we may conclude that all of them have reflections of the time period that they were written during. I would consider all of these pieces to be pretty successful representation of the American literature although some people may have different opinion.

For example Theodore Dreisers Free was not so popular among masses but still it has some points concerning the relationships between people and nature within certain timeframes. All of the pieces were very interesting and reflective and I would definitely recommend it for reading for those interested in American literature of 18th-19th century.

Bibliography

Neal Pollak, The Anthology of American Literature, McSweeney's Books, September 1, 2000.