Theodore Dreiser and How People Really Feel About Work

In A Book About Myself Theodore Dreiser observes at one point that "after security, nothing seems to be so important or so desirable to the human organism as rest, or at least ease," and acknowledges that "[t]he one thing that the life force seems to desire to escape is work." It is a thing too rarely admitted--because since the beginning of civilization, even as those in power have been distinguished by their freedom from the obligation to work and indeed showing off that freedom, the obligation to toil has traditionally been recognized as something inimical to a dignified and full and truly human existence, and humans not born to that privilege that allows for such an existence have always clawed and struggled after the privilege of not working and looked upon those who did not succeed in that as unworthy (those lacking a "competence" literally "incompetent"), acknowledgment of the desire to not work as natural has been anathema to those in power given that their not working has required having the slaves work for them, the more willingly the better. Indeed, that desire of the individual for ease rather than toil is so contrary to how society has been organized for millennia, and especially to the prevailing "schema of values" in the modern, capitalist, world (which ceaselessly tells those who work most for least that a lifetime of alienated labor and little if anything else is what is right and good for them, and they are scum if they question anything at all about the arrangement), that Dreiser can quip that "[o]ne would think that man had been invented against his will by some malign power" which "harried" the species "along ways and to tasks against which his soul revolted and to which his strength was not equal."

The rare lack of hypocrisy about such things is one of the book's most attractive traits--and I think critical to his ability to produce a masterpiece like An American Tragedy.

Meanwhile the rarity of that lack of hypocrisy is why, almost a century on, that book remains not some musty classic of sole interest to those whose reading list is driven by what was historically important, but strikes many who pick it up now as all too relevant in a world that, contrary to what Dreiser hoped later in life, has changed very little since his day.