Word: dreiser
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...were little better. The New Republic was run by "kept idealists," and the Nation was staffed "by men and women who were suffering the change of life." Mencken's high jinks masked low insight, according to Angoff, and Mencken never fully understood even the writers he championed, e.g., Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis. He thought Henry James "was an idiot, and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in the world, eh?" F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was "poor stuff." Said Mencken of Hemingway: "The man can't write. Just...
...Others have set to work redefining liberalism. Critic Lionel Trilling attacked the liberal idea that the only true reality is "material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant." It was this idea that kept so many liberals at perpetual war with respectable society, that led them to exalt Theodore Dreiser for his apparent social conscience and to forgive that conscience when he joined the Communist Party. "This is the liberal criticism," said Trilling, "which establishes the social responsibility of the writer and then goes on to say that, apart from his duty of resembling reality as much as possible...
Blank Sense of Pain. Dreiser the secular tragedian lurched toward the apocalypse of revolution like a blind bear shambling to its cave. When he joined the Communist Party, he wrote William Z. Foster that it was the "logic of my life...
...time of hope and full employment, Dreiser's philosophy of poverty is in eclipse. Few today will respect his ultimate decision, but it must be conceded that his fiction came from deep in American life. Dreiser could not bear a world in which beloved brothers could die friendless, in which foreign aristocrats could sneer, wax rich and make wars, in which women-as in An American Tragedy-could be murdered because they became pregnant at socially inappropriate times...
This glum and clumsy man, who sometimes seemed to be making animal noises rather than writing prose, is still able to make the reader share his blank sense of pain. The U.S. has never been patient with its pessimists, but to square accounts with a Dreiser, mere optimism is not enough...