Word: dreiser
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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SHERWOOD ANDERSON and H. L. Mencken pound the desk with defiant Middlewestern fists. There is none like Dreiser--a Gulliver among literary Lilliputians! they bellow. Everyone must take a week's vacation and read "An American Tragedy"; nothing short of a colossal achievement. Simultaneously other critics of an equal eminence rise in anger from their wrath on the labored, Teutonic, Kolossal opus. Written over a period over ten years, this novel, hurriedly completed in a few months, scarcely re-touched, and condensed not at all, has been published in a rough, raw, dull, and barbaric fulsomeness. Let us regurgitate, they...
...meantime, Dreiser's publishers blare forth with sensational advertisements; America's foremost living novelist, as they declare him to be, has written "with the artist's loftiest vision" a tremendous book. Somewhere in all this welter, it seems to me, must be a kernel of truth. Perhaps it is in the significant fact that "An American Tragedy" is being far from phenomenally sought by the book-buying public...
...keep to the middle of the garden path"; but not too strictly, for it is rather pleasant to walk on the controversial borders. And while we are about it, let us ape Mr. Sherwood Anderson's jerky unpremeditated style with about the same degree of accuracy that Dreiser displays in his grammar...
...American Tragedy"--what a book what a needlessly long tour-de-force. And we don't mean maybe! Mr. Dreiser, laborious hind of realism, was disgusted by the sickly romantic breed of best sellers. "Mein Gott!" he belched. (This was way back before Prohibition.) "I shall write a book--oh, such a book." He has. It gripes the romanticists, it wearies the amoral. Mr. Dreiser has forgotten nothing; he has taken a "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable" hero (the big gun, Willie Shakspere spouted all those adjectives) and put him through hours and hours of representative paces...
...want to know how many thousand words it took--but, well, never mind. Guess a hundred, double it, multiply that by two, add an odd fifty for good measure and you'll be pretty near it. Oh yes, Dreiser wrote almost half a million. If anybody else and done it--but, of course, nobody would have--but if anybody else had, the publishers would have said, yawning. "Well, cut that in half, throw away half of that, re-write the remainder four times, looking sharply for split infinitives and dangling participles, and then perhaps, perhaps we shall take a chance...