Description: This second and concluding volume of the great American novelist Theodore Dreiser's autobiography offers a compelling insider's view of the rough-and-tumble milieu of turn-of-the-century popular journalism, in what Dreiser himself calls "a period of orgy and crime". Following Dawn, Dreiser's candid account of his raw youth from 1871-1890 (reissued by Black Sparrow in 1998), Newspaper Days chronicles the would-be literary man's apprenticeship as reporter, travelling correspondent, drama editor and staff feature writer for papers in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and New York from 1890-1899.

Recounted with all the vivid, gritty detail of Dreiser's best realist novels, the story here unfolds as a cautionary tale of innocence lost. (This annotated version restores the numerous sexually explicit passages cut from the first edition, published in 1922.)

In 1890, with high hopes, nineteen-year-old Theodore takes a job on the Chicago Herald. "Because the newspapers were always dealing with signs and wonders -- great functions, great commercial schemes, great tragedies and pleasures -- I began to conceive of them as wonderlands in which all concerned were prosperous and happy". But four years and myriad harsh experiences later, he quits his job on the New York World. "The darksome atmosphere of this delinquent and defective world with which I was now connected... the mental nausea which the whole grim darksome city in its grey, snowy, blowy winter dress seemed to evoke, finally determined me to get out of the newspaper profession entirely, come what might, and cost what it might".

What came, of course, was Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy, and the other novels which earned Dreiser alasting place in literary history.

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