Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser grew up in poverty in Terre Haute, Indiana, one of ten surviving children of a devout German Catholic father, and left home as a teenager to work as a journalist across the Midwest and Chicago before turning to fiction. Sister Carrie, his 1900 debut, so alarmed his publisher's own wife on moral grounds that the firm printed it but refused to promote it, and it sold poorly for years.

An American Tragedy, published in 1925 and based closely on a real Adirondack murder case, finally brought him wealth and stature, portraying a young man's drowning of his pregnant girlfriend as the inevitable product of American ambition and class hunger. He wrote with a heavy, undecorated hand that critics attacked and admired in equal measure.

Increasingly radical in his politics, he joined the Communist Party shortly before his death in Hollywood in 1945.