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89-502: Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser ( / ˈ d r aɪ s ər , - z ər / ; 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). Dreiser

178-986: A Race and Within Our Gates , African American–directed films that presented more positive images of blacks. While the frequency of lynching dropped in the 1930s, there was a spike in 1930 during the Great Depression. For example, in North Texas and southern Oklahoma alone, four people were lynched in separate incidents in less than a month. A spike in lynchings occurred after World War II , as tensions arose after veterans returned home. White people tried to re-impose white supremacy over returning Black veterans. The last documented mass lynching occurred in Walton County, Georgia , in 1946, when local white landowners killed two war veterans and their wives. Soviet media frequently covered racial discrimination in

267-432: A crime that attracted widespread attention from newspapers. While the novel sold well, it also was criticized for its portrayal of a man without morals who commits a sordid murder. Though known primarily as a novelist, Dreiser also wrote short stories, publishing his first collection of 11, entitled, Free and Other Stories in 1918. His story "My Brother Paul" was a biography of his older brother Paul Dresser , who became

356-923: A degree. In 1892, Dreiser started work as a reporter and drama critic for newspapers in Chicago , St. Louis , Toledo , Pittsburgh and New York . During this period he published his first work of fiction, The Return of Genius , which appeared in the Chicago Daily Globe under the name Carl Dreiser. By 1895 he was writing articles for magazines. He authored articles on writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne , William Dean Howells , Israel Zangwill , and John Burroughs and interviewed public figures such as Andrew Carnegie , Marshall Field , Thomas Edison , and Theodore Thomas . His other interviewees included Lillian Nordica , Emilia E. Barr, Philip Armour , and Alfred Stieglitz . In 1895, Dreiser convinced business associates of his songwriter brother Paul to give him

445-565: A famous songwriter in the 1890s. This story formed the basis for the 1942 romantic movie My Gal Sal . Dreiser also wrote poetry. His poem "The Aspirant" (1929) continues his theme of poverty and ambition: a young man in a shabbily furnished room describes his own and the other tenants' dreams, and asks "why? why?" The poem appeared in The Poetry Quartos , collected and printed by Paul Johnston , and published by Random House in 1929. Other works include Trilogy of Desire , based on

534-627: A few to thousands. Lynching steadily increased after the Civil War, peaking in 1892. Lynchings remained common into the early 1900s, accelerating with the emergence of the Second Ku Klux Klan . Lynchings declined considerably by the time of the Great Depression . The 1955 lynching of Emmett Till , a 14-year-old African-American boy, galvanized the civil rights movement and marked the last classical lynching (as recorded by

623-450: A foreword for its second edition (1868), in a mixture of pride and defiance, he wrote: "Le groupe d'écrivains naturalistes auquel j'ai l'honneur d'appartenir a assez de courage et d'activité pour produire des oeuvres fortes, portant en elles leur défense", which translates as: "The group of naturalist writers I have the honor to belong to have enough courage and activity to produce strong works, carrying within them their defense." Naturalism

712-464: A great American business novel." Renowned mid-century literary critic Irving Howe spoke of Dreiser as ranking "among the American giants, the very few American giants we have had." A British view of Dreiser came from the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis : "Theodore Dreiser's books are enough to stop me in my tracks, never mind his letters—that slovenly turgid style describing endless business deals, with

801-431: A living wage, falls prey to several men, and ultimately achieves fame as an actress. The novel sold poorly and was considered controversial because it featured a country girl who pursues her dreams of fame and fortune through relationships with men. The book has acquired a considerable reputation. It has been called by Donald L. Miller the "greatest of all American urban novels." In 1901 Dreiser's short story "Nigger Jeff"

890-437: A mark upon the national letters. American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin . He was a man of large originality, of profound feeling, and of unshakable courage. All of us who write are better off because he lived, worked, and hoped." Dreiser's great theme was the tremendous tensions that can arise among ambition, desire, and social mores. Dreiser Hall, erected 1950 on

979-449: A peculiarly American kind of crime, a form of "murder for money", when "the young ambitious lover of some poorer girl" found "a more attractive girl with money or position" but could not get rid of the first girl, usually because of pregnancy. Dreiser claimed to have collected such stories every year between 1895 and 1935. He based his novel on details and the setting of the 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in upstate New York,

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1068-480: A recognized lynching, a definition which became generally accepted by other compilers of the era: 1. There must be legal evidence that a person was killed. 2. That person must have met death illegally. 3. A group of three or more persons must have participated in the killing. 4. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition. Statistics for lynchings have traditionally come from three sources primarily, none of which covered

1157-512: A relation to the concentration of Blacks in parts of the Deep South: where the Black population was concentrated, lynching rates were higher. Such areas also had a particular mix of socioeconomic conditions, with a high dependence on cotton cultivation. Henry Smith , an African American handyman accused of murdering a policeman's daughter, was a noted lynching victim because of the ferocity of

1246-420: A scientific method that "went beyond empiricism, beyond the passive and detached observation of phenomena". The application of this method "called for a scientist to conduct controlled experiments that would either prove or disprove hypotheses regarding those phenomena". Zola took this scientific method and argued that naturalism in literature should be like controlled experiments in which the characters function as

1335-546: A seduction every hundred pages as light relief. If he's the great American novelist, give me the Marx Brothers every time." The literary scholar F. R. Leavis wrote that Dreiser "seems as though he learned English from a newspaper. He gives the feeling that he doesn't have any native language". One of Dreiser's strongest champions during his lifetime, H. L. Mencken , declared "that he is a great artist, and that no other American of his generation left so wide and handsome

1424-469: A story about a woman who killed her lover, is considered an example of a narrative within the naturalism category. This story, which also used Gothic elements, presented a tale that highlighted the extraordinary and excessive features in human nature and the social environment that influences them. The protagonist, Miss Emily, was forced to lead an isolated life, and that – combined with her mental illness – made insanity her inevitable fate. The environment in

1513-531: A total of 4,733 persons had died by lynching since 1882. The last lynching recorded by the Tuskegee Institute was that of Emmett Till in 1955. In the 65 years leading up to 1947, at least one lynching was reported every year. The period from 1882 to 1901 saw the height of lynchings, with an average of over 150 each year. 1892 saw the most number of lynchings in a year: 231 or 3.25 per one million people. After 1924 cases steadily declined, with less than 30

1602-426: A variety of other ways: being shot, burned alive, thrown off a bridge, dragged behind a car, etc. Occasionally, the body parts of the victims were removed and sold as souvenirs. Lynchings were not always fatal; "mock" lynchings, which involved putting a rope around the neck of someone who was suspected of concealing information, was sometimes used to compel people to make "confessions". Lynch mobs varied in size from just

1691-530: A white woman and were jailed pending a grand jury hearing. A physician's subsequent examination of the woman found no evidence of rape or assault. In 1903, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported a new, popular make-believe children's game: "The Game of Lynching". "Imaginary mayor gives order not to harm imaginary mob, and an imaginary hanging follows. Fire contributes realistic touch." "It has crowded out baseball", and if it continues, "may deprive of some of its prestige

1780-522: A white woman. The mob responded by putting the noose around the officer's neck as a way of scaring him, and completed killing the other man. Although at the inquest the officer identified eight people who had participated in the lynching, including the former chief of police, the jury determined that the murder had been carried out "by person or persons unknown". In Duluth, Minnesota , on June 15, 1920, three young African American traveling circus workers were lynched after having been accused of having raped

1869-756: A year. The decreasing rate of yearly lynchings was faster outside the South and for white victims of lynching. Lynching became more of a Southern phenomenon and a racial one that overwhelmingly affected Black victims. There were measurable variations in lynching rates between and within states. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 38% of victims of lynching were accused of murder, 16% of rape, 7% for attempted rape, 6% were accused of felonious assault, 7% for theft, 2% for insult to white people, and 24% were accused of miscellaneous offenses or no offense. In 1940, sociologist Arthur F. Raper investigated one hundred lynchings after 1929 and estimated that approximately one-third of

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1958-542: Is dead, or that it "may have never lived at all: even in the works of Émile Zola", its founder. "In 1900 an obituary entitled "The Passing of Naturalism" in The Outlook officially declared the literary movement deceased", and that Zola's attempt to create a scientific literature was a failure. This certainly was not the first time Zola's novel had been criticized however. After his novel Thérèse Raquin (1867) had been sharply criticized for both contents and language, in

2047-481: Is long but, because of him, those who follow will never have to face the road through the wilderness of Puritan denial, the road that Dreiser faced alone. Alfred Kazin characterized Dreiser as "stronger than all the others of his time, and at the same time more poignant; greater than the world he has described, but as significant as the people in it," while Larzer Ziff (UC Berkeley) remarked that Dreiser "succeeded beyond any of his predecessors or successors in producing

2136-677: The American Civil War , southern Whites struggled to maintain their dominance. Secret vigilante and terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) instigated extrajudicial assaults and killings in order to discourage freedmen from voting, working, and getting educated. They also sometimes attacked Northerners, teachers, and agents of the Freedmen's Bureau . The magnitude of the extralegal violence which occurred during election campaigns reached epidemic proportions, leading

2225-666: The Great Terror and the non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler . Dreiser joined the Communist Party USA in August 1945 and later became the honorary president of the League of American Writers . Although less politically radical friends, such as H. L. Mencken , spoke of Dreiser's relationship with communism as an "unimportant detail in his life", Dreiser's biographer Jerome Loving notes that his political activities since

2314-672: The Indiana State University campus in Terre Haute, Indiana, houses the University's Communications Programs, Student Media ( WISU ), Sycamore Video and "The Sycamore" (annual yearbook), classroom and lecture space as well as a 255-seat proscenium theater. It was named for Dreiser in 1966. Dreiser College, at Stony Brook University located in Stony Brook, New York, is also named after him. In 2011, Dreiser

2403-811: The Midwest and border states . In 1891, the largest single mass lynching in American history was perpetrated in New Orleans against Italian immigrants . Lynchings followed African Americans with the Great Migration ( c.  1916–1970 ) out of the American South, and were often perpetrated to enforce white supremacy and intimidate ethnic minorities along with other acts of racial terrorism. A significant number of lynching victims were accused of murder or attempted murder . Rape , attempted rape, or other forms of sexual assault were

2492-517: The NAACP and other civil rights groups. On November 25, 1915, a group of men led by William J. Simmons burned a cross on top of Stone Mountain , inaugurating the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. The event was attended by 15 charter members and a few aging former members of the original Klan. The Klan and their use of lynching was supported by some public officials like John Trotwood Moore ,

2581-499: The State Librarian and Archivist of Tennessee from 1919 to 1929. Moore "became one of the South's more strident advocates of lynching". 1919 was one of the worst years for lynching with at least seventy-six people killed in mob or vigilante related violence. Of these, more than eleven African American veterans who had served in the recently completed war were lynched in that year . White supremacist violence culminated in

2670-589: The Tuskegee Institute recorded 1,297 lynchings of white people and 3,446 lynchings of Black people. Lynchings were concentrated in the Cotton Belt ( Mississippi , Georgia , Alabama , Texas , and Louisiana ). However, lynchings of Mexicans were under-counted in the Tuskegee Institute's records, and some of the largest mass lynchings in American history were the Chinese massacre of 1871 and

2759-463: The Tuskegee Institute ). The overwhelming majority of lynching perpetrators never faced justice. White supremacy and all-white juries ensured that perpetrators, even if tried, would not be convicted. Campaigns against lynching gained momentum in the early 20th century, championed by groups such as the NAACP . Some 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress between the end of the Civil War and

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2848-571: The lynching of eleven Italian immigrants in 1891 in New Orleans . During the California Gold Rush , White resentment towards more successful Mexican and Chilean miners resulted in the lynching of at least 160 Mexicans between 1848 and 1860. Members of mobs that participated in lynchings often took photographs of what they had done to their victims in order to spread awareness and fear of their power. Souvenir taking, such as pieces of rope, clothing, branches, and sometimes body parts

2937-412: The " due process " of the U.S. judicial system. He links the decline in lynchings in the early 20th century to "the advent of the modern death penalty", and argues that "legislators renovated the death penalty...out of direct concern for the alternative of mob violence". Between 1901 and 1964, Georgia hanged and electrocuted 609 people. Eighty-two percent of those executed were Black men, even though Georgia

3026-817: The 17th century, in the context of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the British Isles and unsettled social and political conditions in the American colonies, lynchings became a frequent form of "mob justice" when the authorities were perceived as untrustworthy. In the United States, during the decades after the Civil War , African Americans were the main victims of racial lynching, but in the American Southwest , Mexican Americans were also

3115-453: The 1921 Tulsa race massacre in which the majority-Black Greenwood District was razed to the ground. The NAACP mounted a strong nationwide campaign of protests and public education against The Birth of a Nation . As a result, some city governments prohibited the release of the film. In addition, the NAACP publicized production and helped create audiences for the 1919 releases, The Birth of

3204-464: The 1930s). Helen tolerated Dreiser's affairs, and they remained together until his death. Dreiser and Helen married on June 13, 1944, his first wife Sara having died in 1942. Dreiser planned to return from his first European vacation on the Titanic , but was talked out of it by an English publisher who recommended he board a cheaper ship. Dreiser was an atheist. Dreiser had an enormous influence on

3293-799: The 1960s. However, in 2021 there were claims that racist lynchings still happen in the United States, being covered up as suicides. Opponents of legislation often said lynchings prevented murder and rape. As documented by Ida B. Wells , the most prevalent accusation against lynching victims was murder or attempted murder. Rape charges or rumors were present in less than one-third of the lynchings; such charges were often pretexts for lynching Blacks who violated Jim Crow etiquette or engaged in economic competition with Whites. Other common reasons given included arson, theft, assault, and robbery; sexual transgressions ( miscegenation , adultery, cohabitation); "race prejudice", "race hatred", "racial disturbance"; informing on others; "threats against whites"; and violations of

3382-605: The 19th century, as well as financial depression in the 1890s. In the Mississippi bottomlands, for instance, lynchings rose when crops and accounts were supposed to be settled. The late 1800s and early 1900s in the Mississippi Delta showed both frontier influence and actions directed at repressing African Americans. After the Civil War, 90% of the Delta was still undeveloped. Both Whites and Blacks migrated there for

3471-857: The Carolinas, paramilitary chapters of Red Shirts conducted overt violence and disruption of elections. In Louisiana, the White League had numerous chapters; they carried out goals of the Democratic Party to suppress Black voting. Grant's desire to keep Ohio in the Republican aisle and his attorney general's maneuvers led to a failure to support the Mississippi governor with Federal troops. The campaign of terror worked. In Yazoo County, Mississippi , for instance, with an African American population of 12,000, only seven votes were cast for Republicans in 1874. In 1875, Democrats swept into power in

3560-635: The Civil Rights movement, but none passed. Finally, in 2022, 67 years after Emmett Till's killing and the end of the lynching era, the United States Congress passed anti-lynching legislation in the form of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act . Collective violence was a familiar aspect of the early American legal landscape, with group violence in colonial America being usually nonlethal in intention and result. In

3649-538: The House of Four Pillars, an 1830s Greek Revival house in Maumee, Ohio . There Dreiser began work on his first novel, Sister Carrie , published in 1900. Unknown to Maude, Arthur 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), fails to find work that pays

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3738-735: The Mississippi state legislature. Lynching attacks on African Americans, especially in the South , increased dramatically in the aftermath of Reconstruction. The peak of lynchings occurred in 1892, after White Southern Democrats had regained control of state legislatures. Many incidents were related to economic troubles and competition. At the turn of the 20th century, southern states passed new constitutions or legislation which effectively disenfranchised most Black people and many Poor Whites , established segregation of public facilities by race, and separated Black people from common public life and facilities through Jim Crow laws . The rate of lynchings in

3827-590: The South before 1930. Conclusions of numerous studies since the mid-20th century have found the following variables affecting the rate of lynchings in the South: "lynchings were more numerous where the African American population was relatively large, the agricultural economy was based predominantly on cotton, the white population was economically stressed, the Democratic Party was stronger, and multiple religious organizations competed for congregants." After

3916-458: The South has been strongly associated with economic strains, although the causal nature of this link is unclear. Low cotton prices, inflation , and economic stress are associated with higher frequencies of lynching. Georgia led the nation in lynchings from 1900 to 1931, with 302 incidents, according to The Tuskegee Institute . However, Florida led the nation in lynchings per capita from 1900 to 1930. Lynchings peaked in many areas when it

4005-566: The Southwest, Latinos . Of the 468 lynching victims in Texas between 1885 and 1942, 339 were Black, 77 white, 53 Hispanic, and 1 Native American. There were also Black-on-Black lynchings, with 125 recorded between 1882 and 1903, and there were four incidences of Whites being killed by Black mobs. The rate of Black-on-Black lynchings rose and fell in similar pattern of overall lynchings. There were also over 200 cases of white-on-white lynchings in

4094-575: The U.S. Deeming American criticism of Soviet Union human rights abuses at this time as hypocrisy, the Russians responded with " And you are lynching Negroes ". In Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2001), the historian Mary L. Dudziak wrote that Soviet communist criticism of racial discrimination and violence in the United States influenced the federal government to support civil rights legislation. Most lynchings ceased by

4183-646: The attack against him and the huge crowd that gathered. He was lynched at Paris, Texas , in 1893 for killing Myrtle Vance, the three-year-old daughter of a Texas policeman, after the policeman had assaulted Smith. Smith was not tried in a court of law. A large crowd followed the lynching, as was common then in the style of public executions. Henry Smith was fastened to a wooden platform, tortured for 50 minutes by red-hot iron brands, and burned alive while more than 10,000 spectators cheered. Fewer than one percent of lynch mob participants were ever convicted by local courts and they were seldom prosecuted or brought to trial. By

4272-477: The central ideas to an era. The European influence critics viewed it in much the same way as Zola. For example, according to theorist Kornelije Kvas , naturalism presents "forms of human experience not spoken of before – the physiological aspect of human behavior, sexuality, poverty – as literary topics worthy of being dealt with." Recent theorists have either re-conceptualized naturalism as a narrative form, or denied its existence entirely. Some say that naturalism

4361-434: The color line ("attending white girl", "proposals to white woman"). Although the rhetoric which surrounded lynchings frequently suggested that they were carried out in order to protect the virtue and safety of white women, the actions basically arose out of white attempts to maintain domination in a rapidly changing society and their fears of social change. Mobs usually alleged crimes for which they lynched Black people. In

4450-728: The definitions which are given to specific incidents by those sources. The Tuskegee Institute has recorded the lynchings of 3,446 Blacks and the lynchings of 1,297 Whites, all of which occurred between 1882 and 1968, with the peak occurring in the 1890s, at a time of economic stress in the South and increasing political suppression of Blacks. A six-year study published in 2017 by the Equal Justice Initiative found that 4,084 Black men, women, and children fell victim to "racial terror lynchings" in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950, besides 300 that took place in other states. During this period, Mississippi's 654 lynchings led

4539-590: The deportation of Emma Goldman , and the conviction of the trade union leader Thomas Mooney . In November 1931, Dreiser led the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP) to the coalfields of southeastern Kentucky to take testimony from miners in Pineville and Harlan on the pattern of violence against the miners and their unions by the coal operators. The pattern of violence

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4628-650: The early 1930s had "clearly been in concert with ostensible communist aims with regard to the working class." Dreiser's appearance and personality were described by Edgar Lee Masters in a poem, Theodore Dreiser: A Portrait , published in The New York Times Review of Books . While working as a newspaperman in St. Louis, Dreiser met schoolteacher Sara Osborne White. They became engaged in 1893 and married on December 28, 1898. They separated in 1909, partly due to Dreiser's infatuation with Thelma Cudlipp ,

4717-514: The editorship of a magazine called Ev'ry Month , in which he published his first story, "Forgotten" a tale based on a song of his brother's titled "The Letter That Never Came". Dreiser continued editing magazines, becoming editor of the women's magazine The Delineator in June 1907. As Daniels noted, he thereby began to achieve financial independence. During 1899, Dreiser and his first wife Sara stayed with Arthur Henry and his wife Maude Wood Henry at

4806-591: The entire historical time period of lynching in the United States. Before 1882, no contemporaneous statistics were assembled on a national level. In 1882, the Chicago Tribune began to systematically tabulate lynchings nationally. In 1908, the Tuskegee Institute began a systematic collection of lynching reports under the direction of Monroe Work at its Department of Records, drawn primarily from newspaper reports. Monroe Work published his first independent tabulations in 1910, although his report also went back to

4895-480: The focus of violence in Louisiana when they started arriving in greater numbers, their deaths were not tabulated separately from Whites. In earlier years, Whites who were subject to lynching were often targeted because of suspected political activities or support of freedmen, but they were generally considered members of the community in a way new immigrants were not. Other victims included white immigrants, and, in

4984-562: The forms of a class structure based on slavery and social change, together with heredity , represented the forces beyond her control. Lynching in the United States Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States ' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s, slowed during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and continued until 1981. Although

5073-487: The game of football". D. W. Griffith 's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation , glorified the original Ku Klux Klan as protecting white southern women during Reconstruction, which he portrayed as a time of violence and corruption , following the Dunning School 's interpretation of history. The film aroused great controversy. It was popular among Whites nationwide, but it was protested against by Black activists,

5162-475: The generation that followed his. In his tribute "Dreiser" from Horses and Men (1923), Sherwood Anderson writes (almost repeated 1916 article): Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick some of his books to pieces, to laugh at him for so much of his heavy prose ... [T]he fellows of the ink-pots, the prose writers in America who follow Dreiser, will have much to do that he has never done. Their road

5251-514: The historian William Gillette to label it " guerrilla warfare ", and historian Thomas E. Smith to understand it as a form of " colonial violence". The lynchers sometimes murdered their victims, but sometimes whipped or physically assaulted them to remind them of their former status as slaves. Often night-time raids of African American homes were made in order to confiscate firearms. Lynchings to prevent freedmen and their allies from voting and bearing arms were extralegal ways of trying to enforce

5340-463: The late 19th century, however, journalist Ida B. Wells showed that many presumed crimes were either exaggerated or had not even occurred. The ideology behind lynching, directly connected to the denial of political and social equality, was stated forthrightly in 1900 by United States Senator Benjamin Tillman , who was previously governor of South Carolina : We of the South have never recognized

5429-542: The late 19th century, trial juries in most of the southern United States were all white because African Americans had been disenfranchised, and only registered voters could serve as jurors. Often juries never let the matter go past the inquest. Such cases happened in the North as well. In 1892, a police officer in Port Jervis, New York , tried to stop the lynching of a Black man who had been wrongfully accused of assaulting

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5518-435: The life of Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837–1905), who became a Chicago streetcar tycoon. It is composed of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic . The last was published posthumously in 1947. Dreiser often was forced to battle against censorship because his depiction of some aspects of life, such as sexual promiscuity, offended authorities and challenged popular standards of acceptable opinion. In 1930 he

5607-459: The lynchings which occurred in all of the Southern states. The records of Tuskegee Institute remain the single most complete source of statistics and records on this crime since 1882 for all states, although modern research has illuminated new incidents in studies focused on specific states in isolation. As of 1959, which was the last time that Tuskegee Institute's annual report was published,

5696-594: The mid-1870s onward, violence rose as insurgent paramilitary groups in the Deep South worked to suppress Black voting and turn Republicans out of office. In Louisiana, the Carolinas, and Florida especially, the Democratic Party relied on paramilitary "White Line" groups, such as the White Camelia , White League and Red Shirts to terrorize, intimidate and assassinate African-American and white Republicans in an organized drive to regain power. In Mississippi and

5785-681: The most remarkable figure was Vicente Blasco Ibánez ; In Brazil, the main writer of the genre was Aluísio de Azevedo . Naturalism in American literature traces to Frank Norris , whose theories were markedly different from Zola's, particularly to the status of naturalism within the loci of realism and Romanticism; Norris thought of naturalism as being Romantic, and thought Zola as being "a realist of realists". To Link, while American naturalism had trends, its definition had no unified critical consensus. Link's examples include Stephen Crane , Jack London , Theodore Dreiser , and Frank Norris, with William Dean Howells and Henry James being clear markers on

5874-510: The new social order which was constructed under Jim Crow; Whites acted together, reinforcing their collective identity along with the unequal status of Blacks through these group acts of violence. Lynchings were also (in part) intended as a voter suppression tool. A 2019 study found that lynchings occurred more frequently in proximity to elections, in particular in areas where the Democratic Party faced challenges. Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University , defined conditions that constituted

5963-468: The other side of the naturalist/realist divide. The center of Crane's naturalism is recognized as " The Open Boat ," which portrayed a naturalistic view of man with his depiction of a group of survivors adrift in a boat. The humans with their creation confronted the sea and the world of nature. In the experiences of these men, Crane articulated the illusion of gods and the realization of the universe's indifference. William Faulkner 's " A Rose for Emily ,"

6052-414: The phenomena. Naturalism began as a branch of literary realism , and realism had favored fact, logic, and impersonality over the imaginative, symbolic, and supernatural. Frank Norris , an American journalist and novelist, whose work was predominantly in the naturalist genre, "placed realism, romanticism, and naturalism in a dialectic, in which realism and romanticism were opposing forces", and naturalism

6141-724: The previous system of social dominance and the Black Codes , which had been invalidated by the 14th and 15th Amendments in 1868 and 1870. Journalist, educator, and civil rights leader, Ida B. Wells commented in an 1892 pamphlet she published called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases that, "The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense." A study published in August 2022 by researchers from Clemson University has stated that, "...rates of Black lynching decreased with greater Black firearm access..." From

6230-537: The right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. Lynchings declined briefly after White supremacists, the so-called " Redeemers ", took over the governments of the southern states in the 1870s. By the end of the 19th century, with struggles over labor and disenfranchisement, and continuing agricultural depression, lynchings rose again. Between 1882 and 1968,

6319-533: The second most common accusation; these accusations were often used as a pretext for lynching African Americans who were accused of violating Jim Crow era etiquette or engaged in economic competition with Whites . One study found that there were "4,467 total victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941. Of these victims, 4,027 were men, 99 were women, and 341 were of unidentified gender (although likely male); 3,265 were Black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were American Indian, 10 were Chinese, and 1

6408-565: The starting year 1882. Finally, in 1912, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People started an independent record of lynchings. The numbers of lynchings from each source vary slightly, with the Tuskegee Institute's figures being considered "conservative" by some historians. Based on the source, the numbers vary depending on the sources which are cited, the years which are considered by those sources, and

6497-482: The targets of lynching as well. At the first recorded lynching, in St. Louis in 1835, a Black man named McIntosh (who killed a deputy sheriff while being taken to jail) was captured, chained to a tree, and burned to death on a corner lot downtown in front of a crowd of over 1,000 people. According to historian Michael J. Pfeifer, the prevalence of lynchings in post–Civil War America reflected people's lack of confidence in

6586-503: The teenage daughter of a colleague, but were never formally divorced. In 1913, he began a romantic relationship with the actress and painter Kyra Markham . In 1919, Dreiser met his cousin Helen Patges Richardson (1894–1955) with whom he began an affair. Through the following decades, she remained the constant woman in his life, even through many more temporary love affairs (such as one with his secretary Clara Jaeger in

6675-515: 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 raised as Catholics. According to Daniels, Dreiser's childhood was characterized by severe poverty, and his father could be harsh. His later fiction reflects these experiences. After graduating from high school in Warsaw, Indiana , Dreiser attended Indiana University in 1889–1890 without taking

6764-534: The victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners . Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimized ethnic minorities . Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South , as the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in

6853-528: The victims were falsely accused. Tuskegee Institute's method of categorizing most lynching victims as either Black or white in publications and data summaries meant that the murders of some minority and immigrant groups were obscured. In the West, for instance, Mexican, Native Americans, and Chinese were more frequent targets of lynchings than were African Americans, but their deaths were included among those of other Whites. Similarly, although Italian immigrants were

6942-401: Was An American Tragedy , published in 1925. From 1892, when Dreiser began work as a newspaperman, he had begun to observe a certain type of crime in the United States that proved very common. It seemed to spring from the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown ambition to be somebody financially and socially. Fortune hunting became a disease with the frequent result of

7031-402: Was Japanese." A common perception of lynchings in the U.S. is that they were only hangings , due to the public visibility of the location, which made it easier for photographers to photograph the victims. Some lynchings were professionally photographed and then the photos were sold as postcards , which became popular souvenirs in parts of the United States. Lynching victims were also killed in

7120-617: Was a mixture of the two. Norris's idea of naturalism differs from Zola's in that "it does not mention materialistic determinism or any other philosophic idea". Apart from Zola and Norris, there are various literary critics who have their own separate views on the matter. As said by Paul Civello , these critics can be grouped into four broad, and often overlapping, groups: early theorists, history-of-idea critics, European influence critics, and recent theorists. The early theorists saw naturalism thematically and in terms of literary technique. The history-of-idea critics understood it as an expression of

7209-582: Was born in Terre Haute, Indiana , to John Paul Dreiser and Sarah Maria (née Schanab). John Dreiser was a German immigrant from Mayen in the Rhine Province of Prussia , 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

7298-476: Was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. Naturalism (literature) Literary Naturalism traces back most directly to Émile Zola 's "The Experimental Novel" (1880), which details Zola's concept of a naturalistic novel, which traces philosophically to Auguste Comte 's positivism , but also to physiologist Claude Bernard and historian Hippolyte Taine . Comte had proposed

7387-548: Was known as the Harlan County War . Dreiser was a committed socialist and wrote several nonfiction books on political issues. These included Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), the result of his 1927 trip to the Soviet Union , and two books presenting a critical perspective on capitalist America, Tragic America (1931) and America Is Worth Saving (1941). He praised the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin during

7476-703: Was majority white. Pfeifer also cited "the modern, racialized excesses of urban police forces in the twentieth century and after" as bearing characteristics of lynchings. A major motive for lynchings, particularly in the South, was white society's efforts to maintain white supremacy after the emancipation of enslaved people following the American Civil War . Lynchings punished perceived violations of customs, later institutionalized as Jim Crow laws , which mandated racial segregation of Whites and Blacks, and second-class status for Blacks. A 2017 paper found that more racially segregated counties were more likely to be places where Whites conducted lynchings. Lynchings emphasized

7565-771: Was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Swedish author Anders Österling , but was passed over by the Nobel Committee in favor of Sinclair Lewis . Politically, Dreiser was involved in several campaigns defending radicals he believed victims of social injustice. These included the lynching of Frank Little , one of the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World , the Sacco and Vanzetti case,

7654-543: Was not uncommon. Some of those photographs were published and sold as postcards. In 2000, James Allen published a collection of 145 lynching photos in book form as well as online, with written words and video to accompany the images. The murders reflected the tensions of labor and social changes, as the Whites imposed Jim Crow rules, legal segregation and white supremacy. The lynchings were also an indicator of long economic stress due to falling cotton prices through much of

7743-482: Was published in Ainslee's Magazine . It was based on a lynching he witnessed in 1893. Dreiser's short story " Old Rogaum and His Theresa " was originally published in 1901. His second novel Jennie Gerhardt was published in 1911. Dreiser's portrayals of young women as protagonists dramatized the social changes of urbanization, as young people moved from rural villages to cities. Dreiser's first commercial success

7832-430: Was time for landowners to settle accounts with sharecroppers . The frequency of lynchings rose during years of poor economy and low prices for cotton, demonstrating that more than social tensions generated the catalysts for mob action against the underclass. Researchers have studied various models to determine what motivated lynchings. One study of lynching rates of Blacks in Southern counties between 1889 and 1931 found

7921-526: Was very popular in its time and was known in different literary traditions in Western Europe . In the Netherlands , there was Cooplandt, Couperus , Frederik van Eeden and Marcellus Emants . In Germany , the most important naturalistic writers were Gerhart Hauptmann , Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf . In Belgium, the most important writers were Cyriel Buysse and Stijn Streuvels . In Spain,

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