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Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Theodore Dreiser grew up in
a poor family with an emotionally distant and morally rigid
father. Dreiser supported himself from the age of fifteen,
spending one year at Indiana University before obtaining a
job as a reporter with the Chicago Globe. He read
the works of late-nineteenth-century scientists and social
scientists such as Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley who agreed
that human evolution was based upon the principle of the "survival
of the fittest." Fascinated by human destinies and motives,
Dreiser addressed the tension between determinism and human
compassion in his fiction. In the early 1900s, Dreiser suffered
a nervous breakdown but rallied to become an editor and, later,
editorial director of the Butterick Publishing Company. His
novels include Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt
(1911), and An American Tragedy (1925).
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