In his realistic depiction of the thwarted aspirations and unfulfilled hungers of the turn-of-the-century American underclass, Theodore Dreiser was a socially-conscious writer far ahead of his time. Dawn, the journalist-turned-novelist's brutally candid autobiography of his first nineteen years, was composed between 1912 and 1915, but withheld by Dreiser due to his misgivings about the potential impact of its frank revelations, daring even by today's standards, of adolescent sexuality. Encouraged by his preeminence in American letters at the time and by the more relaxed moral codes, he finally published it in 1931 (it was followed by Newspaper Days as the next chapter of his autobiography).