Word: dreiser
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Columba and the River details how a quirk of hydrodynamics blows a sand hog unharmed from a collapsing tunnel to the surface of a river. With leaden humor, Dreiser jeers at the man's belief that the saints had preserved...
...Brother Paul gives an autobiographical account of Dreiser's love for his composer-brother Paul Dresser (he changed his name), and how Dreiser came to write the opening lines for his brother's best-remembered composition, now the state song of Indiana...
...Lost Phoebe probably comes closest to expressing the essence of Dreiser's drab vision of life. An old farmer becomes convinced that his dead wife is actually lost in the woods and wanders year after year in search of her. He is granted one happy hallucination, blunders toward the apparition, and falls to his death at the foot of a cliff...
...Indiana Peasant." A world revolution in taste and manners has come and gone since Dreiser wrote Sister Carrie in 1900. By 1916, H. L. Mencken had hailed this "Indiana peasant" as an ally in his war against sentimental fiction at the same time that he made a whole chrestomathy of Dreiser's woebegone phraseology and chapfallen cliches...
Mencken's shrewd assessment suggests a clue to Dreiser's loneliness and the ursine indignation that set him on the path toward his final intellectual disaster. The man had a hankering after general ideas, but no talent for them. Dreiser had juggled with New Thought-a heresy from common sense fashionable before World War I-as well as with antiSemitism. Yet his was the genuine voice of a man who has lost his bearings in industrial society. His sense of pity and tragedy never left him, and for men of such temperament who retain a materialist philosophy, there...