Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1871 , August 27, in a strict Catholic family. His father, Johann Paul 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 daughter of a Mennonite family that had come to Ohio from Pennsylvania. Since he was a Roman Catholic and her family was strongly anti-papist, religious tensions forced the couple to elope