August 27, 1871 - Herman Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana.  

1884 - Dreiser moved to his fifth town in twelve years with the family, where he resides with his mother's relatives, Mame, Emma, and Theresa.  They lived in a third floor apartment at West Madison and Throp Streets.  This  was a middle class neighborhood and a melting pot of Poles, Germans, Jews, Swedes, Irish, and other races.

1887 - At 16 years old, Dreiser began taking the train to Chicago to find work and was finally hired as a dishwasher at a restaurant on Halsted Street.

1889 - Dreiser was just drifting along with a hardware job when one day he was summoned by Mildred Fielding, his former teacher, now principal of a Chicago high school. Fielding  asked him to go to Indiana University at her expense and arranges
that Dreiser enter the University even though he only had one year of high school.

1891 - At age twenty Dreiser was delivering laundry for Munger Brothers, a Madison Street laundromat.

1893 - Dreiser got his break as a newspaper reporter.  

1894 - Dreiser moved to New York.

1898 - Theodore Dreiser and Sara Osborne White get married on Massachusetts Avenue in New York.

1899-1900 - Dreiser begins working on Sister Carrie.

1907 - Sister Carrie sold 4,617 copies at this point and, after working his way through editorial ranks, Dreiser became chief editor of Butterick publications.

1912 - Dreiser returned to Chicago to find a different city than he had known
as a boy.  He moves in with William C, Lengral, editor of Building Management magazine in Chicago.  Lengral was located at 712 Lincoln Parkway.  

1913 - Much of Dreiser's time was spent with conspirators of the Chicago
literary revolution hanging around Schlogl's Restaurant and the Little Theater in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue.

1914 - Dresier moves to Greenwich Village in New York, strectching from
Washington Square to North River.  He desired a freer and better life with no idea on how to attain it.


1919 - Dreiser boarded an Indiana bound train and was met at Huntington, IN by May Calvert Baker, his former teacher who put him up at her home.  After a week in Huntington, he went to Indianapolis to meet his Chicagoan friend, John Maxwell.  

1922 -  After three years, Dreiser returned to New York, but does not care for all the smoke and noise.

 
1926 - Dreiser's An American Tragedy sells more than 50, 000 sets and he
brings in $47, 647.53 on this book alone.

1935 - Stricken by bronchitis and mental depression, Dreiser loses 18 pounds.   Upon his recovery, he agrees to lecture at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.   He tired of Chicago, however, and eventually moved to California, living from place to place and eventually dying there in 1945. 1