Dawn

In the 1910s, in early middle age, Theodore Dreiser, already America's great gritty realist, began to take stock of his crowded, complicated life and of the persons and forces that had shaped it. He embarked upon a multi-volume work he planned to call "A History of Myself," a brutally honest untangling of "the net of flesh and emotion and human relationship into which I was born and which conditioned my early efforts at living." By 1916 he had completed the first volume, Dawn, a chronicle of his poor Midwestern boyhood and a book so candid and sexually explicit that, out of respect for his family's feelings, he delayed its publication for fifteen years. In 1922, he finished the second, Newspaper Days, the story of his literary apprenticeship in the roughneck world of big-city dailies. Together they constitute one of the great American autobiographies, less known perhaps than those of Henry Adams and Ulysses S. Grant but in every way worthy of the same short shelf.