A Hoosier Holiday 1916 By

"A Hoosier holiday" by Theodore Dreiser. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer living in New York. He had not been back to his home state in over 20 years. When his friend Franklin Booth approached him with the idea of driving from New York to Indiana, Dreiser's response to Booth was immediate: "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it." Along the route, Dreiser recorded his impressions of the people and land in words while his traveling companion sketched some of these scenes. In this reflective tale, Dreiser and Booth cross four states to arrive at Indiana and the sites and memories of Dreiser's early life in Terre Haute, Sullivan, Evansville, Warsaw, and his one year at Indiana University. "Because [the book] provides a portrait of the artist as a young man and describes the nation as a mosaic of individual cultures, Dreiser's journey offers several different lessons. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part collection of essays, A Hoosier Holiday lays out the landscape of a nation that ceased to exist once the highway unfurled across the map." -Publishers Weekly

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XLIV THE FOLKS AT CARMEL The run to Carmel, Franklin's home, was not long --say, forty miles--and we made it in a downpour and were silent most of the way. It was so dark and damp and gloomy that no one seemed to want to talk, and yet I took a melancholy comfort in considering how absolutely cheerless the day was. I could not help reflecting, as we sped along, how at its worst life persistently develops charm, so that if one were compelled to live always in so gloomy a world, one would shortly become inured to it, or the race would, and think nothing of it. Once Speed called my attention to a group of cattle with their heads to wind and rain, and asked, "Do you know why they stand that way?" "No," I replied. "Well, all animals turn their fighting end to any trouble. If those were horses, now, their rump would be to the rain." "I see," I said. "They fight with their heels." "Like some soldiers," said Franklin drily. In another place we saw another great stretch of beech woods, silvery in the rain, and Franklin commented on the characteristic presence of these groves everywhere in Indiana. There was one near his home, he said, and there had been one in every town I had ever lived in in this state. At dusk we reached Westfield, only six miles from his home, where the Quakers lived. This was one of those typical community towns, with standardized cottages of grey-white wood and rather stately trees in orderly rows. Because of a difficulty here with one of the lamps, which would not light, we had to stop a while, until it grew quite dark. A lost chicken ran crying out of a neighboring cornfield, and we shooed it back towards its supposed home, wondering whether the rain and wind or some night prowler would not kill it. It was very...

By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer with an international reputation, as well as a fixture on the New York literary scene. He had not been back to Indiana, his home state, in over twenty years when he was approached by his friend Franklin Booth, a respected and very successful artist, to make the trip together by automobile. The result is a narrative brimming with detail and the first modern work of American road literature, capturing the euphoric freedom to be found behind the wheel of a car.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1916 Edition.

By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer living in New York. He had not been back to his home state in over 20 years. When his friend Franklin Booth approached him with the idea of driving from New York to Indiana, Dreiser's response to Booth was immediate: "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it." Along the route, Dreiser recorded his impressions of the people and land in words while his traveling companion sketched some of these scenes. In this reflective tale, Dreiser and Booth cross four states to arrive at Indiana and the sites and memories of Dreiser's early life in Terre Haute, Sullivan, Evansville, Warsaw, and his one year at Indiana University. "Because [the book] provides a portrait of the artist as a young man and describes the nation as a mosaic of individual cultures, Dreiser's journey offers several different lessons. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part collection of essays, A Hoosier Holiday lays out the landscape of a nation that ceased to exist once the highway unfurled across the map." -Publishers Weekly Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser ( 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). In 1930 he was nominated to the Nobel Prize in Literature. Early life--Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Sarah Maria (née Schanab) and John Paul Dreiser.John Dreiser was a German immigrant from Mayen in the Eifel region, 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 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 reared as Catholics.After graduating from high school in Warsaw, Indiana, Dreiser attended Indiana University in the years 1889-1890 before dropping out.Writing career--Within several years, Dreiser was writing as a journalist for the Chicago Globe newspaper and then the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He wrote several articles on writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Israel Zangwill, John Burroughs, and interviewed public figures such as Andrew Carnegie, Marshall Field, Thomas Edison, and Theodore Thomas.Other interviewees included Lillian Nordica, Emilia E. Barr, Philip Armour and Alfred Stieglitz.During 1899, the Dreisers stayed with Arthur Henry and his wife, Maude Wood Henry, at the House of Four Pillars, an 1830s Greek Revival house in the Toledo, Ohio suburb of Maumee.There Dreiser began work on his first novel, Sister Carrie, published in 1900.Unknown to Maude, Henry 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) and struggles with poverty, complex relationships with men, and prostitution. It sold poorly and was considered controversial because of moral objections to his featuring a country girl who pursues her dreams of fame and fortune through relationships with men. The book has since acquired a considerable reputation. It has been called the "greatest of all American urban novels."It was adapted as a 1952 film by the same name, directed by William Wyler and starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones.etc..

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.