The Color of a Great City

Dreiser made his name dissecting American ambition and its brutal costs. This collection of sketches, drawn from his early memories, captures New York City in the years before the Great War transformed it forever. Here is the Manhattan of gaslight and tenements, of immigrants crowding into neighborhoods where opportunity and squalor lived side by side. Dreiser walks the streets with a naturalist's eye, recording the lives of working women, street vendors, laborers, and dreamers who populate his city. There is no sentimentality here, only sharp observation of how people survive, strive, and sometimes fail in the metropolis. The sketches function as a kind of photographic negative of the American dream, revealing what the bright lights actually illuminate. For readers who love turn-of-the-century New York, or who want to understand Dreiser's obsession with the machinery of modern life, this book offers an intimate, unsentimental portrait from one of America's most controversial writers.