A Gallery of Women
$ 15.00
Author: Theodore Dreiser
Publisher: Fawcett t177
Year: 1962 Print: 1 Cover Price: $.75
Condition: Book Grades. Very Good. Light wear
Genre: Fiction/Short Stories
Pages: 464
80126065E
Book Summary
The book consists of 15 distinct biographical portraits of different women whom Dreiser encountered throughout his life. Rather than a single continuous storyline, it functions as a collection of character studies profiling women across various social classes, ages, and backgrounds. Key highlights include:
- Diverse Personas: The portraits feature a wide variety of personalities, including artists, actresses, writers, communists, and adventuresses.
- Central Themes: Each story focuses on the woman's struggle for economic and sexual self-assertion, her search for identity, and her encounter with societal expectations.
- The "New Woman": Dreiser highlights the friction between traditional family constraints and the changing roles of independent women in early 20th-century urban America.
- Character Examples: Volume One includes profiles like Reina, Olive Brand, Ellen Adams Wrynn, and Ernita. Volume Two includes Regina C-, Rella, Ernestine (a Greenwich Village actress who becomes a movie star), and others.
- Psychological Realism: Dreiser steps back as a nonjudgmental narrator, exploring how human desires, passion, jealousy, and despair shape these women as they clash with a rigid world.
