Theodore Dreiser

Bio

(1871-1945) Novelist, writer. “An American Tragedy” (1925). Dreiser came to New York City in 1895. Dreiser lived at 160 Bleecker Street, 165 W. 10th Street, 16 St. Luke’s Place, 118 W. 11th Street, 116 W. 11th Street, and at Patchin Place, all in Greenwich Village, New York, New York; he also lived on W. 15th Street and 200 W. 57th Street. He held a salon at the last address, and some of the regulars included Ford Madox Ford, George Jean Nathan, Alexander Wollcott and Elinor Wylie. “Dreiser observed that not even Chicago had prepared him for Manhattan.” LNY. While recovering from the commercial failure of his first novel, “Sister Carrie” (1900), Dreiser, along with his wife, Jug, in 1903, rented an apartment at 144th Street and Mott Avenue, Kingsbridge, and worked in Spuyten Duyvil. In 1909, when Dreiser was thirty-eight, he and his wife rented an apartment at 109 St. Mark’s Place, New Brighton. In 1923, Dreiser brought his future bride Helen Richardson to Big Moose Lake to research a murder that had taken place there in 1906. Dreiser and Richardson stayed at the Glenmore Hotel, the same hotel the murderer and his victim had stayed at seventeen years earlier. Drieser eventually worked the story of the murder into the novel he was working on at the time, “An American Tragedy” (1925). Dreiser had the house, Iroki, built near Mount Kisco, and lived there from 1929-1938. The private residence has the original stone exterior. A cabin he built for a studio also remains on the property.