When I was four, my parents took me to the beach. I was entertaining myself with a huge, heavy volume by Theodore Dreiser.
“You have a very strange child,” a lady on the beach said to my parents. “She just sits there staring into this huge book for hours. And there aren’t even any pictures in it.”
“Oh no,” my mother said. “She’s reading. Come here, honey, tell us what the book is about.”
After I retold to the lady the beginning of Dreiser’s novel, she looked at me terrified and never came up to us again.
And I still love Dreiser passionately. I read his novel An American Tragedy over a dozen times and I can quote parts of it by heart.
Clarissa's Blog 
Have you read his 2-part autobiography too: “Dawn” and “Newspaper Days”? I read “Dawn” and was more interested in it than in “An American Tragedy”. Imo, it could well be his best book. “Newspaper Days” for some reason didn’t go so well and I stopped twice near beginning, probably since there he talks of his love life, which unlike his newspaper reporter life is of no interest to me. In case you haven’t read “Dawn”, it’s very recommended.
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I discovered Dreiser thanks to you, Clarissa. Now I want to read Dawn.
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That’s great! I haven’t read the autobiography because I think his novel Genius is plenty autobiographical. And also kind of boring. An American Tragedy is his masterpiece while everything else )including Sister Carrie) is kind of blah.
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I haven’t read Genius, but thought like you that Sister Carrie and some other novels resemble each other and are boring after a while. However, in “Dawn” he writes about his numerous brothers and sisters and it’s real fun.
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