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Theodore Dreiser was born in 1871 to a German immigrant father and a former Mennonite mother. He had nine siblings that survived childhood, and he was one of the youngest. He attended Indiana University for a year and then dropped out to become a reporter, writing on luminaries of the day. He married Sara White, but separated from her within eleven years. Dreiser and Sara never actually divorced, but this did not stop him from playing the field. He went on to have several relationships throughout his life, eventually marrying his own cousin.

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Theodore Dreiser was born in 1871 to a German immigrant father and a former Mennonite mother. He had nine siblings that survived childhood, and he was one of the youngest. He attended Indiana University for a year and then dropped out to become a reporter, writing on luminaries of the day. He married Sara White, but separated from her within eleven years. Dreiser and Sara never actually divorced, but this did not stop him from playing the field. He went on to have several relationships throughout his life, eventually marrying his own cousin.

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Theodore Dreiser was the ninth child born to John Paul Dreiser and Säräh Schanab in 1871. His father had emigrated from Mayen, Germany, in 1844, worked briefly in New England wool mills, and then moved to the Midwest, where large numbers of Germans had settled. He went first to Dayton, Ohio, where he met Sarah, the 17 year old daughter of a Mennonite family. Since he was a Roman Catholic and 12 years her senior, her anti-papist family threatened to disown her. They eloped and she converted to Catholicism. She never had contact with her family again.

The couple raised their children to follow the Catholic faith. John was successful enough to own his own woolen mill but their fortunes changed dramatically in 1869, when it burned down and he suffered a serious injury. The family became nomadic as Dreiser's father looked for work during the national economic depression of the early 1870s. The constant moving made Theodore's education erratic at best. He would begin a school and three months later be pulled out, only to repeat the process in the next town he moved to. The brief education he did have came in Catholic parochial schools. The strictness he encountered there bred in him a severe abhorrence to the religion. As a result, Dreiser's real education came from self study of books.

At the age of 16, Dreiser left home and worked at odd jobs until he came across a former teacher, Mildred Fielding, in Chicago. She paid for him to attend one year at Indiana University in Bloomington (1889-90).

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After his brief stint in college, he made his first step to a literary career with a job at the Chicago Globe newspaper in 1892. He soon left the globe for a more lucrative position at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, where he gained a reputation for being "a writing machine," as one of his editors referred to him. He excelled at writing local feature pieces where he vividly captured the flavor of communities and their local characters. As his reputation grew, Dreiser was asked to contribute fiction as well, and he often wrote poetry and even a script for a comedic opera. He continued to educate himself by reading widely in fiction, science, natural history, and philosophy.

While working for O. S. Marden's Success, he interviewed celebrities like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Marshall Field, William Dean Howells, and Philip Armour. For other magazines, he wrote articles on a variety of subjects that included America's fruit growing industry, the meatpacking business in Chicago, modern art, and the photography of Alfred Stieglitz.

During this time, Dreiser's experiments with poetry and fiction led him to write a short story about a lynching he had witnessed. "Nigger Jeff" was published in a small monthly journal called Ainslee.

In 1893, Dreiser was sent by the Globe to cover the Columbia Exposition, and while there he became acquainted with a local school teacher, Sara White. In 1898, they were married and Sara encouraged him to write his first novel, Sister Carrie (1900). The novel is based partly on the scandalous behavior of his sister, Emma, who had an affair with a married man who embezzled funds from his employer. It tells the story of a young country girl who moves to the urban city of Chicago, and falls into a life of degradation.

She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterized her thoughts it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in the throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken (Sister Carrie, 1981 version).

Even though the book was a critical success, it was a commercial failure because the publishers cowed in the face of social pressures against the immoral character of the heroine in the book. Dreiser went into a decline after the problems encountered in publishing his first novel. His marriage to Sara began to come apart and it was not until 1904, that he again took up literary work. To make ends meet he edited a magazine in New York and then a decade later, in 1910, he wrote his second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911).

Jennie Gerhardt was the story of a young woman (again based on the life of one of his sisters, Mame) who was seduced by the town Senator. She becomes pregnant, has a child, and lives a life of poverty while never telling anyone who the father was in order to protect the Senator's career. With its publication, he began a decade and a half of literary productivity which included fourteen books of fiction, plays, autobiography, travel writing, sketches, and philosophical essays.

In 1912, he published The Financier. In this work, he shifts his earlier attention on female protagonists to a male protagonist, Frank Cowperwood. Dreiser decided that he needed a trilogy to explore this figure, and it came to be called "The Trilogy of Desire." The second book was The Titan (1914), but Dreiser had difficulty completing the third book and was still working on the final chapter of The Stoic when he died in 1945.

In 1947, thirty-three years after The Titan, the final volume was published. The novel's emphasis from the material to the spiritual is generally viewed as evidence of Dreiser's decline while at the same time the trilogy is considered to be among the finest American historical novels. The Stoic reflected his late interest in Hinduism, which, like his earlier attraction to Quakerism, centered on the mystical element in its system of belief. The book was published with an appendix by Helen Dreiser that outlined the novelist's plans for the ending.

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Dreiser separated permanently from Sara White in 1909, but never earnestly sought a divorce. In his own life, Dreiser proved that he was just as controlled by his sexual appetite as were his characters. He carried on several affairs at once.

In 1919, he met Helen Patges Richardson, whose grandmother was a sister of Dreiser's mother. She was a young and beautiful actress. They had a twenty-five year relationship that survived periods of separation, estrangement, and his affairs.

Dreiser and Richardson left New York in 1938, and permanently settled in California. In 1942, Dreiser's wife, Sara died, and Dreiser married Richardson in 1944.

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In his later life, Dreiser became interested in socialism, visiting the Soviet Union as a guest of the government and writing his perceptions: Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928) and Tragic America (1931). Among his other works are such collections of short stories as Free (1918), Chains (1927), and A Gallery of Women (1929). For this reason, the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) kept his actions under surveillance. Dreiser joined the American Communist Party just before his death in 1945.

As a champion of public causes in the last two decades of his life, he had always prided himself on being what he called "radically American," which for him had included his freedom to defend the rights of speech of socialists, anarchists, and other radical groups who had criticized American capitalism. Dreiser joined many American intellectuals whose idealization of the Soviet Union was stimulated by the economic breakdown and social malaise of the Depression years.

In 1944, he traveled to New York to receive the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Dreiser died of heart failure at his home in Hollywood, California, on December 28, 1945. He was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Hollywood.

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